DÝCHÁNKY 10 - Proč je důležité v životě zpomalit?

[Music] This ad, it belongs right here on your radio. Because when something is in the right place, it reaches its full potential. That's why, at Amgen, a world leader in independent biotech innovation and human therapeutics, we believe in a culture of belonging. Whether you're looking to kickstart your career, or are ready for your next opportunity, you have a place here. By fostering an environment that values learning, collaboration and purpose, we empower people to take charge of their journeys to live, win and thrive. Visit careers.amgen.com and find where you belong. By fostering an environment that values learning, collaboration and purpose, we empower people to take charge of their journeys, to live, win and thrive. I want to welcome everyone back to the Piqueneno show. Thomas and I are going to start a new series tonight. Coming off some talks that we've been having over on the Inquisition podcast with Astral and Stormy, talking about Francis Parker Yaki. Thomas mentioned after one of the episodes after we had stopped recording, we're talking about basically continental philosophy. It's kind of a continental philosophy, something that you study your whole life and you still struggle with. I asked Thomas if he'd be willing to start a series, see how long it goes. He said, "Yes." Thomas, the floor is yours. How are you? I don't know. Well, thanks for hosting me. I'm going to have to jump around a bit to make clear what we're talking about. Something that's important to acknowledge is that philosophy used to be a unitary discipline. When a discreet political philosophy branched off from that, in my opinion, that owed to the Peloponnesian War, enthucidities of the first political philosophy for my opinion, West Point types traditionally, as well as in the Cold War, like strategic studies and political science types, they put a premium on thucidities. I think they misunderstand them. They like the claims of thucidities of the first political realist. That's not true. I understand why they think that, but it's not just a superficial reading of Owing to his deliberate reticence. It's also a misunderstanding of the context of what the source is of what we're talking about as an intellectual tendency. I should probably. I'm going to begin our self-interdiscution by talking about thucidities, which is going to do a discussion of Socrates. The Peloponnesian War is the reason why Socrates was executed. I agree with Sorrell. Socrates deserved to be executed. That's an minority position, but if you're on the right, I don't see how you cannot abide that. Socrates was not one of the good guys. But I'm going to start with thucidities and then dovetail into Socrates in the next episode. But I think I should start with something of an explanation as to what our political philosophy is important. Basically, what the political right, how it is situated with respect to these intellectual tendencies. It's complicated, too, because a lot of the later right-wing philosophers show up in power and need to hide the right-wing philosophy as a late modernity. These guys are partaking of humanist conceptual orientations. They just had a completely different and radically adversarial perspective, contrast to the Enlightenment. I think a lot of people have probably made sense of that. Because in America, they think that the dialectical struggle is between reactionaries or religious people as they think of it and secular humanists. That's not what it is. Discourse might be framed that way, but people don't know any better. But I basically agree with Russell Perrick as regards the American situation. The conclusion one draws in Perrick is that America is intellectually impoverished in some ways. That's not a punitive take. My background is really the only background that can be considered ethnically American. I'm not triaging my own heritage. I think what I just said is indesputable. Anybody who knows the subject matter wouldn't disagree. There's some basic assumptions, epistemic priors, and I think of them conceptual biases, if you will. Essential characteristics, the conceptual horizon of the political right loosely defined. Contra, the majoritarian perspective of the elites from the Enlightenment downward. The recurrent right wing assumptions and predispositions are present for us as a belief in human imperfection. Even true secular right wingers, out and out of fascists, who, if not out and out atheists, were at least at the most like loose deists. Even they acknowledge a basic human imperfection and like man's fallen nature, even if they define it in kind of worldly and caloric terms. And that's arguably one of the reasons why tendencies like national socialism and fascism, you know, sought to intervene selectively with respect to both the biological stock of the racial organism, as well as elevate the cultural competence, the body politic. That wasn't for lack of ability to identify other political projects to dedicate their energies to it. Because the fallen nature of man, again, even if defined in a secularist paradigm, with something first and foremost that, you know, they they accepted. From inception, you know, going to that man is a social organism, even more so than any other species, you know, even do a biological reduction is this is, this is clear. Okay, just in pragmatic terms empirically it's obvious. This can be grounded in a religious doctrine of original sin as an explanatory mechanism or who be arguing entirely in seconds. circular rounds as I just enumerated, you know, including, but not limited to the biological facts of the kind of limited preparedness and, you know, lack of complete and stingsual mechanisms for survival at scale, you know, so the right accepts that this kind of moral imperfection or this kind of maladaptive kind of in-see intrinsic to man, qua man requires both certain restraints and pose of a convention and institutions, but also it requires a curated sociology, you know, to insinuate not just public morals and pragmatic behavioral modalities, you know, and what sorts of impulses identify most of them impulses should be encouraged and that which should be discouraged by, you know, a system of punitive disincentives and material rewards, but also, you know, there's an understanding that man must be unveiled to a kind of moral education as well as like a racial education or an education in the ways of the Paulists if you want to invoke the classical conception in lieu of the kind of 20th century biological conception. Disentals of certain epistemological modesty, man's hubris both in grand terms that the culture brings straddle is prone to as well as in the base terms, you know, one of the sources of the ongoing tragedy, the commons is, you know, the common man's impulse to gratify his ego, you know, whether it's through, you know, coveting the wives of his fellow who's a subjugating principle to profit, you know, and enrichment at the expense of the social organism, you know, there's an understanding among the right, whether you're talking about, you know, conservatives, revolutionaries, radicals, fascists, national socialists, you know, sectarian, artisans, web, you know, a rigidly theological view. This understanding that epistemological modesty as a restraining mechanism is hubris, but also as a correct, aesthetical posture, you know, a man who believes nothing precedes him and who doesn't understand no respect, no esteem, historical processes, and the role of the social organism in those processes as far as edifying man as an individual, and as an individual capacity, as well as a component of a historically contingent social organism or a race, like a man who doesn't accept that is, is somebody who's worthy of contempt, okay? And basically everybody understands that except liberals, you know, and I make this point that people a lot, especially when they try and morally condemn their critics by saying, you know, who are you to judge somebody for, say, being gay? It's like it's not the issue isn't what people are interested in doing in terms of sexuality. The issue is that, for example, to be gay is to take on a social identity, root it around what you do with your penis, and that basically means you've abandoned logos and decided to live like some kind of animal. You know, it's incidental that the kind of subject of that depravity is sex. It could be any of the other things, you know, and when you confront people with this, they'll give you like a dumb look either because they know you're right and they have no rebuttal or because you might as well be speaking Chinese because to them, you know, they basically do the highest good as stating these kinds of glandular impulses and finding ways to gratify egoistic desires often but not exclusively biological and mitigating the pain that exhumacly attends human existence and being alive is painful emotionally and physically. That's not all that it is, but it does have an outsized impact on the way we experience consciousness. We're talking about human life, we're really talking about consciousness, okay? As a consequence of these things, in terms of praxis, the kind of right wing ontology, there's basic assumption therein that institutions and patterned social formations and concrete sociologies are self-justifying and the enduring quality of these things, out of their essential role in perpetuating the survival of the social organism, whether that's the race or the nation or the ecclesiastical community, whatever the primary subject is of the particular disposition, ontological disposition. So this kind of like enlightenment, this enlightenment prejudice that institutions that are perennial and nature need to be subjected to this kind of rigorous cross-examination to determine if they're fulfilling the impulses, which is really what capital liberals mean when they talk about happiness, they're talking about impulse fulfillment, that that's not a legitimate regime, that that's not how we judge institutions, according to practical reason, is whether they're making people happy or not. I mean, yes, obviously, those institutions that are destructive, but generally those cease to exist because there's an anthropic reason, because if these institutions were truly destructive, they wouldn't endure a firmolentia because they'd be doing the opposite of what they're supposed to do. You know, like this is obtuse, but as a counterfactual, like suppose it was an institute that encouraged men to get drunk and beat their children, like how long do you think that would last? You know, I mean, like it's why, kind of the inter-final-exual laziness among people who kind of abide this capital, a liberal paradigm, and they say, "organized religion is bad." It's like, what does that mean? You know, like what is "organized religion?" You know, as opposed to like this "organized religion" as opposed to some sort of sociological anarchy where each man decides privately, like, what is the good that that's not sustainable, and it's not really what they're talking about anyway, because, you know, they're abiding as much of a theological paradigm as their ops are, you know, they just characterize it as grounded in this kind of foe, like Lehman's understanding of science or a pragmatic cultivation, again, of impulse fulfillment. And it's total logical, too, because I don't claim that, well, if you deprive people of the capacity to fulfill these impulses, they'll become anti-social, and they'll seek to sublimate in ways that, you know, harm others, and their respective pursuit of these fulfilling endeavors, which doesn't really make sense, you know, and obviously you can't code that or analyze that in any sort of scientific way, not that I think that there's any. great merit in that, but the Republicans that perspective claim that a reportedly scientific methodology is like the zenith of identifying truth without resort to conceptual prejudice. Yet, the present these postulates is absolutely binding that cannot be available to such methods. So, there's kind of like a built-in, they kind of built in an excuse for rationalizing their own assertions, even including even, you know, by resort to the methods that they privilege. I believe that there's nothing inherently immoral or a value loaded about prejudice is another consistent aspect of the rightest conceptual paradigm. Pregidance becoming this floating signifier for something bad that's very much owes to enlightenment conceptual biases. You know, Edmund Burke, when he invoked the term prejudice, what he was talking about was rules of action that are inculcated by habit that basically become instinctual. Okay, and heum on somewhat different contextual bases made essentially the same argument. Okay, we're talking about customary moral rules that derive from practical reason that again need be available to some punitive cross-examination, you know, or some criteria of force to. This ad it belongs right here on your radio because when something is in the right place it reaches its full potential. That's why at Amgen, a world leader in independent biotech innovation and human therapeutics we believe in a culture of belonging. Whether you're looking to kickstart your career or are ready for your next opportunity, you have a place here. Force to be defended and some conceptual court whereby the standard of review is the degree to which, you know, they produce human happiness by their ability to avail or preclude, you know, impulse fulfillment. And the problem with that is that if you start breaking down these instinctive prejudices, you know, you're basically, you're doing violence to the subjective acceptance of the concept of duty, with individuality and its scale. Okay. So if you're going to break everything down according to the aforementioned criteria, you know, at the same time declare that, you know, there's some absolute moral imperative of not interference with one fellow man. Again, we've already established that man is unusually social, social for a biological organism. And even, you know, if you're a pious believer, you acknowledge that man is at least in large part, you know, possessed of an animalistic nature of pure biology. That's not all he is, but that's substantial what he is. And only that intrinsic soci, only owing to that intrinsic sociality, man individual men are not going to live their lives in isolation. Okay. So how they treat others and how they partake of community benefits and how they seek to engage with that communitarian structure. That's going to very much be defined by their ethics and the prejudices that inform their ethics. And if the only guiding imperative is one of non-interference with impulse fulfillment, well, that's essentially a non-aggression pact that's largely unenforceable and that people are going to find ways to subvert and exploit and are going to enrich themselves at the expense of the communitarian enterprise. Like, so axiomatically that's self-defeating. Beyond that too, you know, there's obviously a moral and in the secular, in the case the secular right, an aesthetical objection, you know, to the curing on that way or irrationalizing those kinds of behavior patterns. But that's a little bit outside the scope of what I want to emphasize in the central ductary description. I think and this is key to the broader topic of this series. Historicism in the Spanglerian sense, like Spangler obviously was not the first historicist, nor was he the most influential, you know, Hagle was obviously, and Hagle is a standard bear. But he's probably more familiar with his historicism in the Spanglerian sense because it's somewhat more accessible at least in superficial terms. Historicism is both fundamentally right-wing and it's also an essential aspect of a rightist epistemology. You know, the understanding that human groups differ, this, you know, there's profound distinctions between and within populations. You know, yeah, there are certain universals that oh and derive from the human condition, you know, but the understanding that the developmental cycles of discrete races and cultural groupings and populations, you know, the prime symbols that constitute, you know, the symbolic psychological aspects of these human groupings, you know, the customary prejudices, the conception these people have of themselves, you know, the sorts of activities that they consider to constitute the highest manifestation of virtue in both individual and communityerian capacities. These things are going to differ profoundly, you know, like across these racial, ethnic, sectarian and population divides. You know, this idea that there's a single ambition that all human populations are striving to and that, you know, human differences and identitarian criteria are some kind of obstacle to progress. That's essentially a communist stick viewpoint. Now, I don't want to sound like some basic bitch, like Mr. Higgs said, he was not calling, like saying communists are hiding under his bed, like some 1950s John Berger or something, because that's fucking retarded. But I do think we can speak of a communist, agnotive thought or Jacobin if you prefer or, you know, there's a concrete conceptual bias that I'm describing. And, you know, I think involving terms familiar rather than esoteric or constructive in describing it. But, you know, that's an insidious, if beyond an insidious tendency in that, you know, it kind of does violence to the ability to produce culture and a higher kind of human life. You know, it also, it rips people out of their ability to live historically. And when you do that to people by design, you're essentially imprisoning them in their own life. You know, and even if you're not somebody who values, you know, things of an historical nature for their own sake, you know, it, it basically precludes human happiness. And we're talking about fulfillment and freedom from anxiety and a reasonable fear of mortality and all these other things. You know, you're essentially guaranteeing that people are not going to be able to navigate their living existence in a fulfilling or psychologically stable way. And we suggest that there's some grand moral ambition that the political authority should seek to realize. And that's the real, that's the essence of the political divide today. You know, there's only globalism in the resistance. There's not like dozens of permutations of ideological commitment or conceptual models. You know, there are the globalists who prevailed in the Cold War. You know, their particular ideological paradigm of globalism prevailed. And there are people who wish to live historically and not be torn out of history and have the identity and characteristics that constitute their human identity ripped out of them. You know, that's not always saying anybody who doesn't understand that isn't really in a game because they don't understand the last 500 years and they don't understand most critically the 20th century and thus they don't understand the present because you live in the aftermath of both those things. You know, and that's what the divide is. It's somebody imperfect that's talking about it right versus left but again for the sake of intelligibility, you know, I continue to invoke those signifiers but I think increasingly it's meaningless to describe it in those terms but the one second, what kind of time we get, okay. You know, and finally, even, you know, what you're talking about, the perspective of the ascetic entities and adjacent as we'll get into though not those ascetic entities wasn't the standard bearer of the position that socrates deserves to be executed again. He was he was tazeturn on those sorts of questions. You're kind of, but you can kind of tease out what he thought of these things just kind of like you can with, you know, reading Machiavelli as well. But intrinsic to rightist epistemology is a belief that religion is essential. And if only for utilitarian reasons, you know, make the point again and again, I hold out Charles Moross as an example. Moross was an atheist and I think he was more of a fashist than a reactionary. Even though like he he held out, you know, the demistory was obviously his primary influence. So he held out the monarchy and in particular the Roman churches is essential aspects of the French as a people and you know, the and as a racial organism, you know, that could coherently be said to exist historically. You know, so even people aren't devout Christians or Muslims. They, I believe it's basically impossible to be, to be right wing and be entire religion. So when people talk that way, they're either they're either professional liars and shills or trying to kind of corrupt the conversation at scale or by poisoning discourse or other people who don't really have a developed view of of politics and you know, political matters either concrete or or theoretical, you know, they they just feel threatened in some instinctive way by the excesses of regime ideology, which is normal. Like I'm not saying that I'm not like throwing shade on that or something obviously, but um, a lot of people are inculcated with this kind of derasinated view of like a religion tries to impose duties on me that I don't like or you know, people are alienated from any sort of sectarian belief structure of a historical nature, you know, they're they're only experience of religion is going to some mega church, their mind, drag them to or something, you know, or when they think of religion, they think of like Joel Osteen, you know, I don't know exactly because that way of life is kind of alien to me. Conceptually, but you know, the if for no other reason, even even right wingers or critical of this kind of zealous religious enthusiasm, that's that can be characteristic of the body politic when, you know, they're they're agitated by some crisis or some kind of historical shock, you know, even people who make a priority of criticizing that kind of put be an impulse towards, you know, sweeping um, moral zealousness as applied to public life and sociality at scale are pretty unconditionally committed to the understanding that, you know, without some sort of metaphysics, there's not going to be any sustainability to the, to the political organism, you know, and really the only way that can be intelligible and, you know, the after the 17th century or so, you know, what's what's failure, obviously, is my poll star here is through the lens of whatever the dominant religious theological strain has historically been within the culture, you know, and this part takes a symbolic psychology as well and the kind of stuff that Carl Jung and in Jasper's and people like that got into that's a bit of a set the scope. But, you know, one of the reasons why I come down very strongly on people who try and fall back on this kind of Darwinist perspective, what claiming to be right wing, because that's not, that doesn't track, you know, and the only reason people think that, that that perspective is somewhat the right is perspective is because there's such an absolute bully pulpit until recently for elite opinion, which is monolithic in the managerial state. And even if there are divisions therein in a system like ours or in a system like the Soviet system was when, you know, the world's divide between competing globalisms, even if there are even if the real house of the elite of the non-manclature as a house divided that will never be broadcast publicly. And you know, hashed out through some sort of this cursing process that the body politics is available to us some key participants. So I realized that probably went a little longer than I expected, but that's what we're talking about. We're talking about the kind of philosophical basis, bases of, you know, partisan political commitment, you know, and this is why it's important, not just in terms of cultivating intellectual rigor, but also in terms of, in terms of praxis. You know, um, but that also invites the question, like, what is what is political philosophy? Political philosophy, and again, the origins of the continental philosophy and the origins of, at all things that characterized the European cultural mind weren't derived from ancient Greece, you know, classical Greece, you know, the zenitha which was the reign of Pericles just before the Peloponnesian War, you know, in the, in the, in the heir to that, the heir to that culture was wrong and Europe was the heir to both, you know, is the way to understand it. And like I said at the outset, these synities were the first political philosopher. Now, this is somewhat to be clear, there wasn't, there wasn't that, but there wasn't a division, formula, conceptual in Athens between, you know, oh, this is, this is religious philosophy, this is political theory, this is metaphysics, this is mathematics, there was that's a singular philosophy. Okay. Um, an essential understanding too is that there wasn't a concept of the state. One of the weirder things that made, and as we get into the Peloponnesian War, which is the only book that the synities wrote, it also, the Peloponnesian War, in my opinion, from a Higaylian perspective, the Peloponnesian War was within the cultural form of classical Greece and its civil-asian cycle. That was the equivalent of what, no, they called the Eropagian Burger Tree, the European Civil War, you know, 1914 to 1945. It destroyed both Athens and Sparta. It destroyed classical Greece as we know it as an historical phenomenon. The Athenian assault and Sicily was Athens-Stalingred. And we'll get into all what I mean by all this in the next episode. But, you know, Athens basically became this hyper-capitalistic dictatorship that became exceedingly brutal towards people within the Greek race, or Greek ethnos. It standard bearers came to rationalize this sort of extreme violence at scale by resort to a paradigm of might makes right. And this kind of total logical sensibility of, well, now we're at war, it doesn't, and the podium in Oregon was 30 years. But the kind of rationalizing pathology was, it doesn't matter that this war was unjust, because now we're at war and we've got to prosecute it to the fullest extent possible and enrich ourselves as much as we can in the process. And we've got to annihilate our enemies to survive even if they're fellow Greeks. That's an incredibly depraved perspective. I mean, it's goofy for Americans in 2025 to pretend they're the Athenians anyway. Athens was a society based on slavery as, you know, for 40,000 years basically every society was. It was hyper patriarchal, you know, it was decidedly anti-Galitarian. And you know, the root of the term democracy is demos. Demos refers to an ethnos. It refers to a people. It's not human beings voting or persons. So there's something, there's something weirdly, conceptually illiterate about, you know, regime, loyal people, like invoking Athens as the model and pretending that America's a democracy. I mean, you can't talk about those, I mean, first and foremost, they bring it back. And I said I wasn't going to go on tangents and they're at one. But there was no state in Athens or Sparta. You know, and you'll find some translations, particularly stuff kind of from the zenith of what I think was like John Cacodemia from like the 50s to the 80s, when it became really cheap to print books. And then it's kind of explosion of like economic tax, you know, kind of feed the educational curriculum to all in the century. You'll find translations where they say, oh, the Paulus means the state. It doesn't. A loose translation would be like the nation or the country or like the race. I think that's a more appropriate term, but there was no concept of, okay, this is the Paulus, but there's this permanent bureaucracy that kind of manages, you know, tensions between, you know, different blocks in the body politic and, you know, these guys were responsible for levying taxes and, you know, this, this guy's responsible for the militant. There was none of that. Like the social organism and the political apparatus were the same thing. You know, and every adult male, what he was of a military age, you know, served in the military of war. I was expected to die on orders when necessary. And if he lived to advance age, you know, that commitment would end, but, you know, he continued to serve in the assembly. You know, really the modern state as we know, you can't hold up the state as we conceptualize it until after Westphalia, in my opinion. So, you know, you might as well be talking about, um, you might as well be talking about your own planet comparing the managerial state to Athens, you know, classical Athens or stardust, you know, it, like even, even anti-status tendencies in the modern age, you know, like, for example, the confederacy here in America, they were reacting, first of all, they actually did have a state bureaucracy, like whether they wanted to or not, just because that was reality. But even people who are hostile to it on ethical or aesthetical grounds, they were reacting to something that was the norm. You know, so you can't, you can't, you can't, you can't compare the two things. But, um, excuse me, the, uh, and the traditional view of course, I know that people in the comments, um, are going to say, socrates was the first, uh, was the first political philosopher, you know, he was, and the first, um, the first, you know, work of political theory was Plato's, uh, the Republic. Bear with me on this. Um, I, I'm, I'm going somewhere with this when I identify through cittities. Okay. Because again, what I mentioned a moment ago, the city was the first to screetly political philosopher. That's why, like I said, these military science types, particularly during the Cold War, identified him as like the progenitor of strategic studies, and of political realism, like the Mure Shimer sword, which I think is both a midwit take and, subtenably, they don't really understand the kind of core of acidities, ontological claims. But what they are right about is that, you know, the first purely the first pure political philosophy is the cities of the Peloponnesian War. Plato, like his teacher Socrates, and like Aristotle, he's exceeded both. They didn't have a discrete political philosophy. Aristotle is the politics. He's speaking about politics as an aspect of like all things related to philosophy, you know, and the Nikabaki and ethics is as much of political work as the politics. But I'm getting a little bit ahead of myself. You know, and whether the other objection, I'm sure, would be that, well, neither the Cinnitus, Merciless, Schrolynris, philosophers who preceded them, like, yes, obviously. But you know, the priest of critics didn't then form this course for two thousand years subsequent. You know, and by that token, you know, I mean, how what we're getting in a pretty esoteric territory. But there may have been civilizations in the Spenglarian sense, you know, 30,000 years ago, the record of which has been totally wiped away. Okay, but that's not where we're not speaking in absolute terms. We're talking about we're talking about the origins of the European cultural mind and the historical and intellectual tendencies that it is derived from. And that begins with Socrates and Thesonides. Now, it's similar vein. The, well, here, actually, strike that. I'm sorry, I lost my place. From it. Okay, here we go. The Peloponnesian War, the book, I mean, The Cinnitus's book. We'll run it a little late to get into the meat of it. We'll do that in the next episode. But the core of it is, again, the Cinnitus was very reticent. He didn't issue forth a value judgment on the proceeding 30 years. But the core of kind of crux of it is that you can't understand man unless you understand human societies. Okay. Effort clarity. The Greek word, "physic," which obviously we derive physics from. It wasn't the science of motion. It literally meant things that grow or by nature. So it basically included everything. Okay, it was remarkably holistic. You know, everything from everything from atoms to, you know, the world itself or the ocean or whatever. Okay. There wasn't even accounting for like discrete dialogues about the political or the Paulist. Until the Peloponnesian War by the Cinnitus, there wasn't a book that presented itself as, this is a book about human societies. This is a book about the nature of warfare. This is a book about human societies at war. And like data we can derive therein, like for future generations, you know, about literally the science of waging war, which is the essence of politics. And thus you have, you know, the science of the political, you know. And it was considered something of a faux pas. I mean, at the time, I'm like, word for it. It was something that wouldn't have occurred to people, even people, even learned men of high breeding in Athens or Sparta, who have something of a punitive view of the military command structure and the weighted wage the war or of the senior men in the political apparatus. Like even if they even if they had, you know, like a critical view of these things, it wouldn't really have occurred to them, you know, to kind of write about the sort of baser impulses that animate individual men within these structures. It wouldn't really have occurred anybody to draw like a kind of punitive portrait of the Paulus which nurtured them in decline. Okay. Now, Thucinides obviously, the punishment generally for a commander who lost the war was death. Okay, Thucinides was such a great man. He was spared and he was banished. Okay. So there's some scholars who'll say that like, well, Thucinides wasn't an bittered man. So he's, you know, got, he's kind of presenting the war in a light least favorable to his own country. I don't think that's true because, uh, specifically in, um, specifically in some of the dialogues, he's clearly resorting to a kind of apologia in favor of Athens. Um, the Spartans interesting we had come to blame themselves when the war was going badly for them and Sparta won a period victory, okay. And I'll get into the, I'll get into these specifics of this, but the Spartans sued for war, um, after the Athenian contingent, many of whom were actually living in Sparta because they were doing business there. They approached the Sparta assembly and, uh, they kind of like lead bear that they attended the, uh, continue on their course of conquest, no matter what the human cost, um, going to fact that the strong law is dominate the week and, you know, war arrives like the seasons. And when war and rumors of war abound, I'm paraphrasing here, you know, we are going to preempt that and, you know, we are going to abide the will of the gods, the fullest, because one of the highest good, you know, the highest good is, you know, to be remembered historically, you know, and, um, there are some, some of the learned managed Sparta subsequently viewed this as, uh, a safe phasing, a face saving measure by the Athenian delegation does an invitation to arbitration in lieu of warfare, well, in the Spartans safe phase, but they were being in the fact of insulted. Um, the city says that's not true. He says these people were as obtuse as they appeared to be. You know, um, at the same time, he, based, he presents the Spartan system as, it is flexible to the point that it couldn't really respond to existential crises with any other paradigm, other than like a directly military, um, response, which is true. I think it's weird that people hold out Sparta as it's like based society. Sparta was all fucked up. He I don't think it was. Like, you know, you know how you. don't read books like Spartan philosophers. You don't know why because they're worth any. You know, um, the reason why people like Hobbes, blah, I'm like spard up is because there was something in primitive terms. The pillow, the palipinesis were not primitive in cultural terms at all, but I mean it's in technological terms. Um, they did practice a kind of radical socialism. I trust me. People would not, like like 21st century guys, I think they're right-wing would not would not have liked living in sparta. Okay. But um, yeah, we're coming up about an hour. Um, I don't want to dive into the palipinesian war. We'll do that next episode. But um, I think cover is what I want to do here. I'll try and pick up the pace next time. Um, but yeah, that's um, I hope that people found this to be worth well. Awesome. Can't wait till the next episode. Um, while considering that, uh, Twitter is doing what Twitter does to you, where can people find you? Well, I got a discord server now. Uh, and I've got a bunch of other cool things going on. I mean, my home is always sub-stack. And um, I'll always be on social media because you have to have a presence there. But I think social media is kind of especially, especially acts is kind of bullshit. I mean, there's a story through a gene aside. It's just kind of a bullshit platform, but people should come to my substack. It's real time is 777.substack.com. We got a pretty active telegram channel to know. You can find that there. I'm on Instagram. The discord server is hopping. Like a whole bunch of a whole bunch of the guys. Um, we got a bunch of channels. We got a text channel. We got a voice channel. We got like a multimedia channel. This week, I'm is very harried. And a dear friend of mine and ours is coming to town tomorrow. I got to meet him at the airport and shaperone him around the city. And then we got symphony tickets on Saturday. A bunch of the homeland fiction guys and I and plus I've also got like, I got some long foreign stuff. I got to I really do need to complete because I owe it to other people. But so now I'm just gonna be the discord channel topping. Go visit it and use it. But I'm not gonna be I'm not gonna be real active with new stuff until next week. But yeah, that's go to substack. You'll find a link to the discord. You'll find a link to my telegram. At long last, I released the documentary from Utah. It's anybody use a subscriber. A paid subscriber can access it. I think you'll enjoy it. My dear friend, Ray, and I are gonna film another movie this summer. And as I transition to more video content, I hope people will will find it worthwhile. But that's what I got. All right, until part two, I look forward to it. Thank you, Thomas. Yeah, thank you, man. I want to welcome everyone back to the Pikenyana show. I'm here with Thomas 777. How are you doing, Thomas? I'm doing well. Thanks for hosting me. There's kind of a lot to address today. Part of that's my phone going to how I organize my outlines in my mind and things. So I'm gonna try not to make this skater shot. If it ends up in a way, please, I'm gonna ask. I'm gonna apologize in advance. There's a few other things going on here. Because I want to tie together how continental philosophy relates to the present. And anything that relates to the present, obviously, relates to the 20th century. And we're in the counter enlightenment reach the disease in terms of these grand postulates and ethical imperatives that we're presenting a challenge to what had been the consensus really since the West Fillion piece. To a greater or lesser degree. Okay. And these thinkers were drawing upon the presacratics for a reason. Okay, particularly if we're talking about, you know, Nietzsche, Hepatitis, Schopenhauer, I think we've fictored in there too. You know, and today, the kind of reemergence of stuff like virtue ethics that a lot of the cat, Roman Catholic comrades will know what I'm talking about there. All right, that's really Aristotelian. But Aristotle represents a complicated paradigm. Okay. But political theory starts with Lucidies. Okay. But the way things cities is presented is misunderstood. And I don't just mean by like, I mean, there's a basic intellectual dishonesty among ideologues who was scribe to enlightenment, truisms, and things. They kind of deliberately misconstrued stuff because, you know, they practiced their own sort of dishonest revisionism with respect to the intellectual heritage of Western civilization. But there's military science types as well as a lot of people who kind of came out of Cold War, academia. They just don't understand these cities. And the way they present it is, this is the first example of, you know, military science and political realism because Lucidies is saying that, you know, falling back upon, you know, the preeminence of Athenian virtue. And this integral philosophy that there, there, there, there, if we're going to kind of the framing, the conceptual framing device, if any philosophical treatment award peace, he's doing away with that. That's not what he's doing. What he's saying is that he's saying Athenian civilization is fallen. And so it's sparta, but obviously his concern is Athens. And he's saying it's fallen because this is what we abandoned. I do as far to say that he blames things like the plague which hit Athens, can come in with the Peloponnesian war, which is what I'm for decades, the war I mean. And the catastrophic defeat at Sicily, the Sicily expedition was, was Athens' Stalin bread, okay? Like history doesn't repeat itself, but there are patterns. And there are data points that we can extrapolate from politics and political configurations, particularly states at war. Okay, the Sicily expedition destroyed Athens. And Red Ascent as Thucydides is he clearly thinks that Athens, that's like the wrath of the gods. They're like Athens abandoned virtue and this was their punishment. They were destroyed. Like we were destroyed. And Thucydides was spared. You know, it's clear to me, I think, if you, I'm not like a classics guy, I don't, I don't read Greek or anything. You know, I'm a 20th century political theory guy. But it doesn't take, you know, layman like me can discern the Sicily as his conveying, like I was spared because, you know, it was ordained for me to, you know, to tell a story for posterity, you know, and to abandon a future generation. This is how our civilization fell. That's what he's saying. Okay. And there's also blind spots in, you know, I, the Athenian military, like Pericles Athens. You know, there's some confusion, especially among people who are in classics types. We're not talking about the Athens of, of the Iliad. We're talking about Pericles Athens. Okay. That, that was probably the peak of civilization. You know, like that's not the sum romantic mythos. I mean, I think that's basically an arguable. Okay. These people, it's not like they didn't have any understanding of military science. It's not like they didn't have any understanding of like physical science. Not like they didn't have any understanding of, you know, the realities of, of, you know, cold, the cold calculus of military tactics and grand strategy. They weren't a bunch of like, they weren't a bunch of like, airy romantics sitting around saying, oh, we disdain rational understandings of, of military processes. I mean, that's preposterous. Okay. If they, if they're a like that, they, I mean, nobody's like that. Okay. Like, even the command, she's weren't like that. I'm not from shade of the command, she's, but they're obviously, I'm comparatively primitive, worried, pride, you know, who prized individual valor over, you know, um, complex, um, infantry maneuvers and things. But So, I want to talk about the synities and continue that. You know, through synities things that, through the lens of surreal, during surreal and Pradhun, I'm probably biased, but they're clearly making the case that sogarities deserve to be executed. And they're getting that through to sit, from the synities account. And though, through synities doesn't see that. So, there's like a lot here, okay? There's the fact that modernists don't present through synities correctly. There's the fact that the ideological right is very much drawing upon classical integral ethics to assert its legitimacy and to present, you know, its values in a way that, you know, is not just precedented historically, but that can be said to represent an ideal, it actually was extant, and that was the progenitor of, you know, Indo-European civilization. And also, this is the starting point of political philosophy, which to me, it takes precedent, because that's what my wheelhouse is. And that really qualified to talk about other aspects of the continental tradition. I mean, I could, but there's better, there's more knowledgeable guys that could do it. But that's a starting point. You know, and like I said, if this becomes skater shot to give me. The basic, the only, the Peloponnesian war is the only book through synities ever wrote. And yeah, I mean, obviously it's a book about warfare and a war, any political paradigm. That was there to foreign precedented. But what you can extrapolate from it generally is that to understand the nature of man, you can only understand human society. And the only way you can really understand human societies is by studying their behavior and war. Okay. But that's not some calo romanticization of war. But as Prodhun pointed out later, is that Cyril, which is a peculiar relevance to us, the reasons I just explicated warfare is bound up with man's, if we're talking about, you know, people, cable, high culture, but warfare is bound up with man's concept of beauty. It's bound up with his conceptions of honor. It's bound up with his understanding of remedial justice. You know, his entire kind of the prime symbols of the culture that he, that he, that is nurtured him, you know, always things. You know, that's why I'm always making the point that really the, the, the Germans only contribution to enlightenment thought was closets and closets was a great battlefield commander. And there's some truth in what he wrote, but it's, it's an object nonsense that is postulate that, you know, warfare is this rational process that is just, you know, diplomacy but by violence. Like that's, that's nonsense. That's an enlightenment nonsense. You know, and it's not an accident that the, the German contribution to that rationalist paradigm, we don't derive from military science. And, you know, that, um, the city is actually coming from a totally different place. At, uh, the city is really in the opening paragraph of the Peloponnesian War. He tells his readers that, you know, he documented it from the beginning. He began commanding forces during the doom of the Soviet expedition, but he began writing from the onset of hostilities because he said that this was, that this is a war unlike any that there has ever been. Okay. Um, he referred to it as the greatest emotion that ever afflicted, or ever impacted like the Peloponnesus. Like, with that translates as in real terms is the, this is the most significant catalyst or historical, um, variable or like prime, constellation of causes that constantly like a prime move on, agent or agent of motion, that never occurred. At least something of the Greeks. And, um, you know, that was, that's, that's not just his reference point, but this was really the center of, this was really the center of civilization. You know, it's not like there was a constellation of civilizations all over the planet that were, you know, on the, on the order of Greeks. I know people would pause at the Chinese, but they, they were very different. And obviously there wasn't contact, you know, in, in any meaningful way. The, uh, there was three critical variables in the Peloponnesian war that for purposes of historicism. And again, my, and I stand by this assertion, to sit at ease was a proto historicist. And a real sense, you know, that's, that, that's not just, you know, extrapolating 20th century conceits to, um, like Spanglerian paradigms to, to sinities. They only would understand people like Spangler is that this is what they were drawing upon. This is the intellectual heritage. Um, the most significant data points as we think of them today or, uh, uh, you know, critical battlefield events, which, as, through sinities, explocage, these battlefield events were indistinguishable from political ones. I mean, part of that is, uh, a function of the Greek mind, but part of that is because this war was negatively political. You know, that's why like a compare it to, uh, you know, the conflict cycle of 20th century Europe. You know, again, that history does not repeat itself, but it should be familiar to the Spanglerians among the subs. You know, you can extrapolate, um, paradigms because we're talking about a limited number of variables and outcomes because we're talking about human beings organized politically at scale. And we're talking about armed conflict. There's not infinite, um, permutations there. Okay. But the three, the three critical variables, um, we can extrapolate from, consider these kind of Peloponnesian war is a siege of Milos and, uh, the destruction of the millions as a people. Okay. And, um, the Millian dialogues, we, or the Millian dialogue, which I'm sure is familiar to people who know the source material. Okay. That's, that's the reason why we was so large in the bog. It's not just because obviously it's, it's, it's incredibly, um, it's incredibly severe. But it was, it was a, it was a critical event. I'd say that it's, uh, I'd say it's not unlike, um, a lot of the excesses perpetuated by the third right. Um, although the causal, uh, nexus, obviously was distinguishable, but in terms of the political significance of it and, um, the sum of the repercussions, I, it's, there is, um, there is some common, um, there is, there is some common, uh, proverbial territory there. Um, the disaster is a stolt that's Sicily, which as I said in my opinion, we thought of as, um, as, uh, the Athenian Stalingrad in some ways. And could come in it with both of these things. And the entire kind of, um, the raison d'etre, uh, as the Athenians themselves presented it, um, what presented the causes of belly and how they rationalize their actions. This destroyed Athenian moral legitimacy. Um, they sacrificed their core virtues and an effort to secure and consolidate. [BLANK_AUDIO] power political credibility, you know, which is key here. They didn't take, undertake these extreme measures and kind of openly issue what was purportedly their own core values. And they did this in the Spartan assembly, you know, when they were during, when Athenians, some of whom were residing in Sparta at that time, they went before the Spartan assembly and they were nakedly hostile in their apology, which was impressive. And you know, and this wasn't just a flex to try and deter, you know, Spartan aggression and kind, the conditions were way beyond that. This representative to real break down on the internal constitution of the Athenian cultural mind. Okay. And again, these dramatic, these dramatic and almost unfathomably brutal decisions that they rendered. These weren't difficult decisions in the heat of military crises. These were very calculated. And the end result wasn't to capture immediate battlefield advantage. It was quite literally to not sacrifice credibility moving forward. And what was viewed as a then approximately permanent conflict paradigm, you know. And the Spartans fell on their own sword and kindness and response to that when the Spartans directly intervened. Finally, the Spartans allied, they cultivated alliance with Persia. And for centuries afterwards, speaking of the Spartans was the utterant of sanity because they allied with, you know, a racial enemy of all Greeks. You just don't do that. You know, and here's another parallel in the opinion to the European conflict paradigm of the 20th century. That's why it's arrived to me that people act like, I guess it's because of that silly movie. About thermopole or whatever, like people have exporters, this like incredibly utopia, like Sparta was a mess. You know, it was authoritarian, it was shortsighted, it was anti-philosophical. And, you know, they became traders to their own kind. You know, like this isn't, this isn't some model for high culture or good stacemanship or anything. Well, that's, that's kind of a digression, but short story of long and I don't want to derail us with a blow by blow of the Peloponnesian war. Some kind of context is appropriate. Like essentially the Peloponnesian war basically began as like a war of proxies. And the, the intrigues around these initial decisions were a murky. And I mean, it's just pretty much always the case within complex and highly scaled conflict paradigms. The Athenians were subjected to an accusation by Corinth, which was a rival naval power. And they were an important member of the Peloponnesian alliance, which is like the Spartan alliance. The Corinthian's charge that Athens was assisting a colony revolt, a corkura in a sea battle against them. They had flourishing with technology and weapons and know how in order to wage the war. The Corinthian diplomats, their big concerns that this is inevitably going to provoke a general war, which they believe was coming in any event, and do a, what a matter to an arms race throughout the Peloponnesis. That's why these alliances had emerged to begin with. It's not exactly clear why the Athenians felt specifically threatened by Corinth, but something through Cedars explocates and statements by the Athenian diplomatic cadre in Sparta as they stated their position before the Spartan assembly. The only way that Athens can truly thrive and be secure is if it has an absolute advantage in the ability to deploy and apply force. And even if that makes slaves of all other Greeks, all men covet power because all goods tangible and metaphysical derive from power. So that means that fallen as the Athenians may seem, this is an inevitability and to say otherwise is too live. And it's better to admit that you wish to make slaves of other Greeks than too live before you're equals. That's total logical and it's very tortured and it was very ungrick at the time. But reading between the lines and through Cedars subtly makes this point too, although he doesn't break his reticent narrative voice. What the Athenians are really saying is that there's some sort of crisis of foot that can't really be explicated. And wars and rumors of war are, you know, they whispered by the gods and men alike. You know, war arrives like the seasons. Something apocalyptic is before us. And, you know, fortune is a fickle mistress. And she only grants her affections to, you know, the men are most willing to dare to take what they must in order to, you know, guarantee their continued dominance. I'm saying some classics types who would think I'm over simplifying things and they're probably right. But again, I already stipulated I'm not any kind of classics professor. As things deteriorated in theater and threats translated into active warring, you know, the Spartans through secret diplomacy, you know, made it clear to their league, telepenies and league partners that they would intervene at the opportune moment. Which ultimately came during the ill fate of the salt and cis we. But before that, the slaughter of the Millions happened and for a context and we'll move ahead from this historical backdrop and a minute or background. The Millions occupied in the eye. island in the G and C, which was actually neutral. It was the one island in accounting for technology at the time in operational striking distance of the enemy heartland that the Athenians didn't directly control. They demanded that the Malians surrender or face devastation. And again, these were fellow Greeks. The Malians refused to capitulate probably because they realized that they were doomed anyway and they wanted to die as men. The Athenians slaughtered all of them and sold the women and children into slavery. They shot the conscience even of the Spartans. You know, because again, treating people within the culture that way. We're talking about an equivalent of the Westphalian consensus. There's certain lying to them across. You know, and that, through cities, is clear subtle as it may be conveyed that this is what doomed the Athenians as a race, as a people. You know, this is what brought the plague upon them, literally the plague under their house. When they assaulted Sicily, the inhabitants of Sicily were a warrior race. You know, they were into European they were in Greeks, but they were very closely related. Syracuse was a, the Athenians were very gravely concerned. They were going to pivot to Sparta. They preemptively assaulted their assault cause them to pivot towards Sparta. The Athenians laid siege to Syracuse. This lasted for months. When the Athenians, instead of out to reconstitute or into this quagmire, they found themselves in the Spartans assaulted in a coordination with the Sicilian natives. They slaughtered the Athenians. They chased them literally back to the sea during the Athenian retreat. The Athenians are trampled by their own men. Athenians began slaughtering each other to try and fight their way to the sea. It was a massacre that destroyed them. The, which brings us to the case of Socrates because again, there's nothing so simple-minded as a suggestion from these cittities like ironic subtle direct or indirect that Socrates somehow caused this sort of malaise and moral depravity that led to the destruction of Athenian civilization. Like Norwood Pradhun or Cyril suggest that. What Socrates was was he was the standard bearer of a way of being. He was a bad man. But more than that, he was a standard bearer of this way of being that was nakedly and catastrophically deleterious to the Athenian way of life. So by executing him, the Athenians were repudiating their own corruption as a race. Okay, yes, the trial of Socrates was beset by bad procedure and probably by purged testimony. And Socrates was an all probability not afforded a proper defense according to the strictures that of justice remedial justice that you know are are universally accepted by men who were a higher reason. And the Athenians certainly qualified, but that isn't really the point. The issue with the trial and execution of Socrates isn't, you know, with Socrates given a fair trial, as if we're talking about some hapless poor man or something accused of an infamous crime. Like the question is that Socrates deserved a dire knot. And where you following that question essentially tells us where you fall plurically the process is incidental in this case. The way to understand the significance of Socrates and what he was doing violence to by way of his intellect and his discourses. The way to understand what the civilities was suggesting constituted the Athenian ethical soul. The way to understand what people like Cerelle and Pradhun and Sobhavar and Nisha and Haydegur. And all of these counter-in-elatement thinkers, like the essence of what they're talking about is really ontological. You know, that's why I like in the first episode I think I just talked about like values like this being an issue of values. Not in the way that's this talking about cloke we really, like American media politics or something or not in terms of practical reason or it's part of it. You know, it's a whole kind of way of life and way of being and conceptual structuring of the world. You know, the classical Athenian view, the common thread we're talking about is that in this way of life I just mentioned the household, the Paulus, communitarian life, integral, conceptual paradigms of justice and beauty and honor both, you know, masculine honor as well as, you know, what constitutes, you know, honor in a woman. This is all tied together, okay. And the household is basically the kind of training round for how to be a good citizen of the Paulus. But to be clear, the Athenians had no concept of a state that's a modern contrivance like the Paulus isn't the state. It's not like the government of Athens. It's not even the city or the town. It the only really way to think about it in modern terms that approaches the conceptual depth of it in any way is the thing it does like the nation or like the race or the country, if you will, okay. And the kind of core tenets of it are instinctive prejudices and judgments, okay. You know, what is just, what is beautiful and most significant, we like what constitutes duty. Like obviously the Athenians and the Romans, you know, inherited this from them, they believe very strongly in a concept of the path they're familiar with, you know. So, I mean, the father, the patriarch is the absolute lord of the household, but that doesn't give them carte blanche, so Bowie is way for treat his kids like they're slaves or something. He has a reciprocal duty to his wife and children, and just as they have a duty to obey him. And from there, men and women and the children in that other progeny, they learn what their duties are and what constitutes a noble life as part of the Paulus. This stuff is instinctive, this stuff is transcendent. These things can be recognized by resort to practical reason. It's not the result of some elaborate discourse, and this is something we debate about. We don't debate about whether a patriarch would be happier, running around with his friends and hunting pigs, or having a bunch of different women that he gets pregnant, then he treats like a hero. We don't argue about whether women would be happier, like not being subjected to the authority of the household, because that's against reason, and contradicting things derived from reason, it does violence to the concept of the good, and cuts us off from it. So anybody who attacks these institutions is basically attacking the good, and that means that he's a man who either can't live among civilized people because he's a miscreant, and he's just trying to cause difficulties, or he's something of a degenerate personality, who recognizes certain frailties in the constitution of the Paulus, at the end of which he lives, and he's decided to exploit those things, or in choice need to be a contrarian, or maybe it's ordained by God that he do this, but that doesn't have any bearing on whether or not he should be executed as a remedial measure, because the honor of the Paulus demands it. And this, because undoubtedly the question will be raised, and also this is part of the purpose of this series, what relevance does this have to the presence day, I just told you, people like Sarell, were the standard bearers of this notion, and Trudhoun interestingly, he coined the term anarchism, and he was the first political theorist to call himself an anarchist, and he was a socialist, but he held out what I just described as the ideal, and this is important. This is a bit of a digression, I mean, we're going to get to socialism as an ethical postulate later in this series, but this idea that socialism is axiomatically some sort of paradigm of class warfare, or materialist reductionism, or that it's a woke, like that's not the case at all. The reason why it became so inextricably bound up with the continental political consciousness is because the alienation really, the post was failing in order. I mean, it reached an intensity during the Second Industrial Age, obviously, where class war became a reality, but the enterprise was the philosophical and political enterprise was to repair the social fabric that had been torn asunder by the modern age, and most most modern continental philosophers had considered, you know, the kind of high medieval era to be the ideal, but these radical socialists and anarchists, these guys like Cyril, these guys like Werner-Sanbert, these guys like Praduin, they were saying no, no, no, no, no, no, it's Athens, and the trial of the Socrates was an example of, you know, essential, redemptive violence, and that's critical. You know, Marx didn't invent socialism. Marx and Lenin were social, or Marx and Engels rather, forgive me, Marx and Engels were socialists because that was really the only animating paradigm that had any momentum, you know, like don't gonna be wrong, like Dotscapital, it's incredibly internally consistent, but a lot of this derivative, and I mean any, any political theory that is anything other than, you know, a pure thought experiment, the praxis of it as postulated is going to be like derivative, okay, because it's gonna partake of the zeitgeist, and it's gonna build on a discursive foundation, you know, and I've known it even among educated people in America, there's this idea that there was no concept of state socialism, but then Marx and Engels wrote a book. I mean I'm being liberally obtuse for the sake of brevity, but you know, I think everybody understands what I mean, and I'm not sitting here like stumbling for socialism, I'm very much an American and I'm kind of a redneckish, okay, and I mean, king aside, you know, I'm the kind of person Russell Kirk was talking about, you know, and roots in American order, you know, I'm the last person who's gonna sit here and say that, you know, yeah, we really need to, we really need to abide state socialism to write the shift, you know, let me go vote for Bernie fucking Sanders, I mean, everybody's like, hot, I know it's not the way I think, but the European situation is very, very different, you know, and even if it wasn't, you know, these, these thinkers that we're talking about, who represented the counter and the lightening, in the 20th century, you know, which I think is the 20th century was the enlightenment enterprise at it's zenith, reaching its conclusion, that's why, you know, the end of history became the rally and cry, both of, you know, angler and progressives and of commoners, you know, because like their goal is to end history and the reaction and the revolt against that wasn't some sort of reactionary conservatism that was dead, it was people like Cyril, you know, and the progeny of Cyril was Mussolini and Edolph Hitler and the Philanche and the iron guard, the iron guards were complicated, but these thinkers and these partisans who, who's conceptual horizon, derived from these thinkers, they wanted to create an alternative modernity, you know, not, they didn't want to turn the clock back to, you know, 1700 or something. I mean, there were people like that, but they were irrelevant in, like, by 1918, you know, that tendency died on Europe's battlefields with, you know, 10 million, 10 million European youths, you know, and that's important, you know, because like I said, it wasn't hopping around a lot, but it's essential to tie this stuff together and if we don't kind of as we go along, it just becomes so much trivia or some, or maybe an interesting discussion, but nevertheless, that we're not with standing the fascinations of it. It's just a discussion about what people thought in some ancient dead civilization. But moving on, the key to this kind of paradigm of Athenian virtue was a certain anti-intellectualism. Now what we mean by that is just that. We don't mean some hostility to learning about the world or some hostility to a moral education, but intellectualism is a discreet tendency that again evails the subject matter of practical reason to some punitive cross-examination that it can't withstand, or into the fact that these things are pre-rational judgments. And the rallying cry, particularly of social democrats and vimar was fascists are pigs and they're anti-intellectual, horror of horrors, they burn books. And that's very, very species. And as presented, especially in the present, it's intellectually dishonest. But it's not entirely incorrect. It's not to say that people should embrace some sort of jacomism of the right, nor is it to say again that, paraclyzathens was some kind of combination of a weak Roman and of Spartan racial cousins. Obviously like the strength of Athens was that it was a very complete cultural form and they had a remarkably vigorous philosophical heritage. But this tendency to intellectualize things, as a matter of course, as a bad is sentimentalizing them. Both through violence to the practical reason. And reason, logos, isn't rationality or rationalism. And in some ways it's the opposite of that. That doesn't mean the irrational, but rationalism, okay. And the way that we think of it. And this plays into the idea of justice as well and this is critical. Justice and the classical conception, it doesn't derive from social conditions or like material circumstances. It's not an ideology either. It's not some mechanism of social planning. In fact, this is a concept that Nietzsche came back to a lot, is that you can't put justice in the hands of some bureaucracy because that's crude, that's anti-human, but also a state apparatus is incapable of realizing justice. Justice is implicitly sanitary. If somebody kills your brother or your comrade, you don't have some judge who doesn't know you, doesn't know your family, doesn't know your comrade, doesn't know your enemies. Man, I don't even speak your language in a real sense. Sometimes I don't know a literal sense anymore. Because this not a subject matter, he can apprehend. And that's also not what justice is. We don't execute men because according to some modeling paradigm where we develop the right inputs. If you execute men, then the people are such and such percentage less likely to do bad things. That's not what justice is. That's what a social planning that part takes of some loose concept of remedial measures. For the sake of sustaining some sort of base stability in a highly scaled political order where the moral consensus is abstract from concrete things either going to a historical accident or ideological imperative or the sheer scale of government and the parameters of authority or some conspiracy of all three. But it's not justice in the way that it's traditionally thought of what the Athenians would have thought of as sort of a model of criminal justice would be the kind of stuff that vigilantes do in Northern Ireland or that they did in the American South or that, you know, in medieval Europe or early, in Georgia, Japan, you know, the kind of privilege that no woman had to demand satisfaction from somebody who offends against him or his family or the order that he belongs to. There's a totally different thing from punishing a healer who steals something or, you know, healing somebody in the court doesn't pay their taxes or, you know, in the case of something that's axiomatically literally sanguinary, you know, again, like it can't be said to be justice if there's some impersonal bureaucracy, the purpose of which is that it's blind to the circumstances. You know, devising some sort of remedial measure to assuage the likelihood of violent retribution outside of a legal code that itself is devised to guarantee predictability of outcomes. You know, and there a bottle of that would be like, well, look at somebody like King David, okay, but King David was just that, he was a king and he was a king of a discreet population of people who he was bound to by things like tribal allegiance and that's also like the ultimate and noblest of wise, you know, so, it's not actually a bottle, if anything, it substantiates the claim about, you know, classical conceptions of justice. I've only got, we're like, four minutes a hour, man, like I'm gonna stop now 'cause I get, I'm not getting the trial aside with these itself and that's gonna take a long time. - Yeah, sounds good. Sounds good. Tell people now where they can find you since you've been banished off of X for the 25th time. - Yeah, X is shitty, man, then it's stupid. - It's not even worth, I mean, it's slop now. It's a bunch of people trying to make money, you know, by posting questions, oh, what do you think about the picture of this thing and everything and they're just trying to make money with engagement and it's just ridiculous. - No, so we're gonna have, and moving forward, I wanna go off on a big tangent about the current situation with censorship and things, but it's not a good platform, I mean, they always terrorize me, and this aside from notwithstanding that. But the best place to find me, my home online is Substack, which I think Substack really is a good platform. I actually don't ever violate TOS in these platforms. So it's not, but they never threaten me or trying to take away my ability to reach my friends and stuff on Substack. But that's where my longer form stuff is. So the podcast is, that's where all kinds of shit is. And we got a pretty active shit here. So it's real Thomas777, that's Substack.com. I set up a Discord server and the fellows and females, they've made it like really pop. So that's going really well. And I mean, like I said, not 'cause of me, it's because of the people who joined it. It's behind a pay wall by necessity. Otherwise, we would have been gone already. The cheapest you can set it at is $2.99 a month. Okay, so I set it at $2.99 a month. I'm sorry about that. I'm not trying to make money off people. And if I was, I wouldn't be doing it too late. I didn't tie. But the Discord server, you can get a link on the Substack. And we got, that's been very active. I'm going to start this past week. I have some of our comrades in town, and I was just very busy. But this week, I'm going to get more active on Discord and start experimenting with live streams and stuff. We got a T-gram channel, Thomas Graham, 777, number 7HMAS, Graham, 7777. You're going to get the link there through the Substack as well, but it's easy to find. If you just search for it. I'm also on Instagram, you know, with that. That's, I'm changing by necessity kind of the way I configure my content. So this is like bear with me, but you'll always be able to find me on Substack. I do have a website, but it needs to be updated. And I'm going to try and get that done after I get back from OGC and make, but yeah, that's where you can find me. All right, Thomas, I can say for myself, and I'm sure I speak for everyone listening. Can't wait till part three. Thank you. - That's great. Thank you. - I want to welcome everyone back to the Peacognano show. Thomas is back, and this is part three on Continental Philosophy, and where are we going today, Thomas? - I wanted to deal with the trial of Socrates, not just because it's a major point of analysis in Thucydides. I mean, it's integral to his entire thesis, because like we said, last two episodes, despite Thucydides' reticence, he's obviously talking about a moral crisis in the Athenian palace, and like we established, there wasn't a distinction between civil society and the political organism in Athens, and nor was there a simultaneous state as we think of it. Civil society was the state. And that's something that's misconstrued quite a bit. And I don't want to insinuate my own political values into these kinds of series, because I think that compromises the integrity of what's being conveyed. But something that is of interest, I believe, to the subs, is what sort of they can and is of the radical right. And in dialectical terms, how these postulates were right, and the trial of Socrates is kind of the seminal point of origin. Some hagiolians would disagree with that, as would a lot of people who are kind of the scholars of the deep lore of people like Fichta and Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, but I stand by that position. And particularly because the starting point of philosophy in the Western canon is we know where the Socrates is. So the fact that this man was executed, like even if you reject the inferences I draw from that, where anybody else does, you really can't get away from discussing the fact that the man was murdered in an official capacity. And George Cerelle, who I think is fundamentally important, I bet beyond important, I think it's essential. And conceptual terms, I think Cerelle and Demastra are like the real, along the higher, I like the essential theorists of the ideological right. And of course, it's something that separates people so I've done a flight from conservatives. And we'll get into that later, like as we get into Bible theology, which at least we need to discuss for one episode, because it's essential, it's an essential part of the canon. I mean, I'm gonna do so from a secular perspective, but you can't get away from that. And when we talk about that, I think it'd be in order to talk about Russell Kirk. But, you know, I think the point again, and I've written extensively on this, that like when you're talking about the radical right, when you're talking about the revolutionary imperatives that were part of the causal nexus of, you know, the European Civil War in the 20th century, you're talking about people are fundamentally at odds with conservatives. You're not talking about just like conservatives on steroids for verbally or something. You're talking about totally different tendencies. And arguably ones that are actually opposite one another. And Mimical to one another rather. But I think Cyrill's description of what happened at Socrates trial and what the catalysts were for the proceedings. I think it's about the best analysis of it. You know, so for context, that's what I'm drawing upon. And people who find some of these points of emphasis familiar, that's why they will, okay? And again, I don't claim to be some classical scholar. You know, my primary wheelhouse is political and economic theory and specifically like the modern era. I'm not like a classical scholar. I don't read Greek. At one time I was fairly fluent in Latin, but those days on pass, those I can college. But you know, just for context so that you know people don't get some sort of idea that I'm trying to punch up on my weight and suggest that I'm an expert in ancient in ancient philosophy, because I never purportedly. But there's a basic misunderstanding and what the people at review started is being somehow scapegoated by a regime that could no longer stand on its own purported core values. Or a kind of hostility to the intelligentsia. And obviously a lot of like capital L liberals as it's sort of like a favorite sort of shibbolit. There's, oh, there's this British military regime and they were just scapegoating intellectuals who were course with their natural betters. It's the wrong way to understand it, a lot of reasons. And you know, Athens underwent this fundamental sociological change in a very punctuated way. You know, and the gold, it was the years that gold and age of Athens and kind of like, Creek life. Really had nothing in common in terms of the social stradum with the Athens that lost the waves and lost the Peloponnesian war. Like traditionally the education of an Athenian man and make no mistake, there was an egalitarianism in Athens and Aristotle best-explicated this. But it was restricted to people capable of equality and capable of liberty. Like this idea that sleeve. or the people that the Athenians conquered, or women and children should have some say in things like that would be viewed as preposterous. Like that wouldn't even occur to anybody because it's an ontological absurdity. So that's a problem too when you get these kinds of dummy conservatives pretending that they're sort of like race-wind, managerial ideology, where like there's just kind of fetish, fetishization of procedures is something like a legacy of the Athenian culture, that's ridiculous. And to distill it down, and I'm not just playing word games here, this actually matters, democracy, the word demos is the core of it. There can't be a democracy without a demos. A demos is a people. And the way to think of it as a nation, or like a tribe, it's not a stand-up for humans. And democracy doesn't mean we're random people voting, and it doesn't describe some procedure. There could never be a quote egalitarian democracy because it would mean that you're gonna declare that everybody on this planet is part of some imaginary demos. And like that, again, that's an ontological absurdity. Or more concisely, it's a logical fantasy. But anyway, the conventional education in Athens, it was preparation for war. Okay, like it's not to say that Athens were like their Spartan cousins, they didn't view like the primary, they didn't believe that like the wellspring of the good came from martial activities. They didn't or anything like that. And it's not like the Athenian sociology was exclusively tailored towards preparation for war, but in psychological terms, what was viewed as the good was what was most virtuous, what was most virtuous was what was heroic. And obviously, the most mortally significant context where these kinds of heroic virtues can be realized as warfare. So if you're gonna like educate Athenian men and women, the women who manage the household and the men who guard and serve and defend and enrich the Paul is you're gonna teach some things like Homeric epics. You're gonna teach some stories about why you should be patriotic and be heroic and why you should stand by your people and things like that. This wasn't a very complex and it was deliberately sort of simple in a way. And that made it accessible to everybody. Okay, again, everybody was capable of liberty. You know, that's part of the whole point. You know, and this intellectual culture that people associate with the Lyceum and everything that did not exist. Yeah. So on the whole Athens and its cultural zenith, in terms of the way the Athenians thought about themselves, you know, it didn't have an intellectual culture. And nor did it really have a bourgeoisie. And something else to consider, we'll give this a minute. By the time the Peloponnesian war, you had this bifurcated sociology in Athens. You had, for the first time, you had actual oligarchs. It would become very, very rich. This kind of business class of merchants, you know, could profit very much from the empire and, you know, by the ability to access things that were rare in the Paulus, you know, which they could then curate and sell at immense profits. And you had this intellectual caste at which Sog reticles kind of the center, you know, of men who kind of like look down on, who view themselves as superior to the Holy Palloy and kind of look down on like the Yale-Man farmer warriors is essentially, you know, in furious. And kind of brutish and stupid people who were just kind of necessary to, you know, to put up proverbial and literal fires when they happened. You know, this was a, in apocalyptic terms, it was kind of an issue of first impression that hadn't existed before, you know. And obviously Marxist historiography, is one of the things that Cyrille was responding to, viewed this as sort of like the first emergence of like a primitive class consciousness. But not primitive in terms of the cultural nuances of Athens, but primitive in terms of sociological argument texture, which you know, I was even compared to like the modern age. There was just like a lot less moving parts, so to speak. You know, so, the first thing one has to do in dealing with the trial and murder of Socrates, it just abuse themselves as idea that, you know, figures like Socrates, which is kind of like a perennial feature in Athens and the Athenians all just, you know, started acting like a bunch of mean reactionaries and decided to go after the intelligentsia, which is kind of like the dummy core history view of it. The, one of the things that may have been sort of first among the Greeks, the power political rival, but also the sort of absolute endemical force threatening the Peloponnesis was the Persians. Then this is one reason why we got into earlier, it wasn't just the Athenians that lost their proverbial honor and cultural soul in the Peloponnesian War. The Spartans made a fausty impact with the Persians and for centuries subsequent, like I said, the Sparta was a dirty word. You didn't even mention Sparta. That's how much discussed people had for them because they were literally race traders. You know, the decision to host this in anemicus, you know, how you treat people within the culture and within the race and the way you treat enemies from without is totally different. You know, and obviously there's a parallel there in the Westphalian paradigm and they should be instinctive. But that said, the Athenians approved that they alone, they're the necessary power and power of rejection ability and sophistication within military science. They could wage great wars against the Persians and actually win. And the Persians for a long time were afraid of them for this reason. Okay, and people forget too, like Balzi and Heroic as the last standard Thermopoly was, like the Spartans lost. Okay, and like I'm not gonna sit here and pretend like Warfare is like a football game. Or we're like win lost ratio is sort of the end all be all of how you would view it as a martial valor or even aptitude. But in a very pragmatic power political sense, the fact that the Athenians were the counterweight to the Persian Empire, they afforded them a certain cloud. If you require historical metaphor, it's while a lot of people or otherwise despise the American system, nevertheless like join the alliance during the Cold War because the Soviet Union was dominating this planet. And that's an argument, okay. It was America alone that could stand against them in power political terms. And I bring it back a bit, pretty much everybody, and this is clear in the facilities on take and Cyril acknowledges this too. Like the trial of solidities, it was incredibly demagogic. It was basically the case in chief against them. It was polemical slander. And Cyril holding forth by his accusers in a way that was offensive that any rational understanding had due process. But again, there's not the point. Nobody that I know of is claiming that solidities with some conventional criminal defendant that his rights were scrupulously honored. And that under ordinary circumstances, he's the kind of man who should have found himself killed in the court and put in the ultimate penal jeopardy. This is not what we're talking about. He was a stand-in for amoral sickness and cultural decrepitude that had taken a root in Athens and he was the standard bearer of this conceptual horizon that approximately caused the end current dilemma. Even if you hold out Plato and Plato along with their stoppades are the only real sources of our knowledge for aristocratic teachings. People general rely on his description of the paradigm between old Athens and the Athens that essentially ended with its defeats in the Peloponnesian War. Zenoffan was a student of Socrates but he wasn't prone to almost any kind of hegeographies that Plato was even in his critical treatments. Other man, what Zenoffan's big contrast was he said, "Look, he's like in a Homeric Athens, I mean if we can think of it that way, there is an integral understanding of virtue. Again, like the kind of one citizen cast, although there was like diversity within a cast of status and ability and intellect and everything else, but the singular function was a citizen of Yale and farmers who were also soldiers." Zenoffan posited that, "Well, the way these men manage the household and taught their children and treated their wives, this was sort of like a school of command." Transposing that virtue and the several virtues that were curated there to the battlefield and vice versa, this is how Athenians learn to be honorable and this is how they learn what it is to be heroic. There was a practical aspect to this sort of civic education and the school of life and command if you were a man, but it was never diminished by some sort of like base and pragmatic view of it like, "Well, this is how you learn to treat people equitably so that there's not tensions emerging." No, it was very clear who Zenoffan that these were heroic things, you know, and you don't just take a wife and have kids because it's because humans are animals and need to join their gametes together to make children and it wasn't just, you know, "Okay, well, this keeps the women from ending up in difficulties and it keeps the men from acting like savages." There's none of that. Okay, it was an acknowledgment of those things, but that's because the ultimate good is virtue to the who is the heroic and with derived from heroic things are like lesser but no less significant goods that allow us to live like a peaceable and civilized life, you know, peaceable IIT within the culture, you know, it's good. It's not good to be peaceable without. And this becomes important if one is going to subject socrates and secratic methodology in the substance of his paradigms to a punitive critique. So Zenoffan's economicists can be viewed as kind of the seminal statement. It's kind of like the, although obviously Zenoffan was a student of Socrates, he's writing about presacratic virtues. So bear with me. Zenoffan's economicists is really sort of the presacratic, what is describing, equivalent of Aristotle's politics. Okay, and again, I'll stand by that, although I'm sure a lot of classical scholars will scoff at that. But the entirety of the dialogue, the exposition rather, it draws a parallel between the, literally the economics of the home and of labor and of warfare, which makes each, you know, it may put the household into an educational apparatus for war and vice versa. You know, and to be clear, within the Athenian understanding of equality, anyone capable of liberty can grasp basic military tactics, you know. And some men might only be fit when, if they lived in a premature year, as the lead is squad, some might be suited to, you know, the command befitting a general. But nevertheless, like the stuff of virtue is learning the order command by habit and by obedience before one develops the cultivation and the wisdom and the seniority to act in a command or all, you know, and this is the, this is the, this is the stuff of a correct education. And in order to make it real or to bring it to life as a historical narrative, again, this is where stuff like, you know, Homeric epics come in, you know, this also, this cultivates in people, you know, in understanding that the routine execution and necessary tasks, they'll view that as needing to tend towards excellence and they'll, they'll try and cultivate that in themselves. So this in turn then becomes like the building blocks of what facilities truly heroic action, you know, and heroism is partakes of and derives from and also makes possible, you know, the highest virtue. So there's this sort of organic harmonies feedback loop, ideally to everything people do in their lives and waivers and, you know, the emergence of an intellectual class that kind of scoffs at this and looks down on it as the sort of stuff that, you know, appeals to simple tins or, you know, men who view themselves as to clever or to superior to willfully submit to the command of another, this is the effect of sabotaging the entire system because people start marking themselves out from that the entire basis of the collapses because then what emerges is this kind of like cast consciousness within the Paulists and one of those things to ossify and start to run deep enough and it doesn't take very long and only a few generations. People almost start to look at themselves as a different race, you know, and breeding patterns will start to deviate and then eventually you almost do have different races, you know, and you have this kind of coistered intelligentsia who's convinced that they're smarter than everybody and politics belongs only to them because, you know, these commoners can't possibly understand it. And so, in a business class who says, like, well, you know, the soldier here basically have a bunch of dumb animals, formerly good at violence and these intellectuals, you know, they're not real men, they don't produce anything, you know, they basically live on our large gas because we're the ones who, you know, we're the ones who provide the wealth and the capital, you know, to sustain the attaining real life. So, you know, basically everybody parasitic we live on us and that's incredibly toxic, you know, is it inevitable at scale? probably, but you know, again, we're talking about very, very scaled down conditions. And we're social complexities. I'm not suggesting that they were less than the modern era, but the material conditions that cause permutations within these sociologies, they were absolutely quite a bit less complex and less highly scale. And they can't be denied. And now to be clear, nobody, not Zina Fah and himself, not Serel, not Thucydides, nobody was claiming that, like, well, we existed in this kind of, we existed kind of a mess, this like cultural Zina, and then Socrates, the propaganda, subverted all of this and created these fractures within the, within the organ, social, or even the Apollo's. No. Serel went out of his way to acknowledge that the seed of these things, the seeds of Athenian demise had been sown, you know, generations before, but that doesn't somehow acquit Socrates the fact that, you know, he went out of his way to institutionalize these things, figuratively and literally, whether his intention was born a malice or not is an importance, nor is the fact that he was not some ultimate causal agents. There had to be some sort of repudiation of that tendency and historical process, even if for no other reason, then to guard the record of austerity that the Athenians were aware of what had generated their own on doing. And being a highly literate people whose understanding of historical process is quite even different than moderns like Hagle, they never less understood that virtue really, however, it's significant maybe in the moment obviously, and those who directly partake of it and witness it, you know, it's really only as powerful as its ability to be conveyed over a casual time by deliberate documentation for posterity. You know, that's why the Athenians were so hung up on, you know, hero epics and things, obviously. That's literally the source of, that's how virtuous conveyed, okay, by example, but where do people derive that example from? Well, they derive it from stuff like honor. So yes, it's taught logical, but it also is internally logical. So the way to understand such a thesis is the patron saint of intellectuals. If you want to put a spit on it to make it intelligible to modern minds. At the end of the day, Saturdays understood why the physical side of life was important, but again, he said it's important in the same way that, like almost like a wrote biological process is important. You know, if the Paulist is like an organism, this is the equivalent of like eating and expelling waste and hygiene and things. You know, because what was truly good was, you know, the intellectual and the spiritual, the fracturing of that concept of an integral rational soul that contains an aptitude for these things and equal measure. You know, that does violence to the entire cultural enterprise that, you know, have been curated over millennium. So when you look at it like this, like all things, I mean, warfare basically, you know, again, is kind of like a matter of wrote pragmatism. You know, heterosexual law is basically just, you know, a kind of wrote physical act necessary for procreation, you know, in harmony with the household again, too, is just sort of like, you know, something that lesser men can find satisfaction from it and of itself. You know, this is an example of kind of like early like monasticism, although obviously like the conceptual and the literal vocabulary to, you know, structure that way didn't exist yet. But, you know, much as a socrates admonished as students, not to, you know, cross their, quote, you know, cross their arms and laugh at the world, he did, it's ecstomatic that what the good is according to Socrates is to withdraw from the world as much as possible and be a loop, you know, and okay, there were a buttold of that and Socrates is on defense in part, although he admitted he deserved to be executed, which is a subject for a whole other discussion. You know, well, you know, a man in shrewd virtue should be strong enough to understand why, you know, physical pursuits are important and why not withdrawing from his responsibilities, you know, not just, you know, to his issue and his wife, but in the policy understands why he can't just withdraw from those things. It's okay, but when you cultivate this sort of sense of a curated superiority in these men, they're not going to, they're not going to regulate themselves in that way. There's a handful who are, we're kind of the cream of the crop, but most men are not. So what you're left with is it's almost like today, well, you'll see these guys who dedicate themselves to going to the gym or like learning to fight or like bodybuilding, but they're doing it basically, they're becoming obsessed with the physical, but they're doing it to retreat from the world. They're doing it to the sake of like hanging around the gym all day and like not having to deal with things they find stressful. Well, that's the equivalent of like what guys were doing and were learning from sorrows. You know, it's like, okay, so I'm curating this like superiority in myself, you know, so I'm a superior man to these dumb soldier, yeoman retypes as well as these vulgar business men, but you know what, I'm going to spend my time, you know, discorusing with socrates and with my peers, but my peers are only the people who are worthy of my intellect. I'm not going to involve myself in the dirty business of politics or the dull, you know, vulgarity of business. You know, that's, and that's really destructive, you know, and to be clear, I didn't involve the example I did that like pick on people and something. I understand why you guys do that, but you know, it's, I think it's important in people in a way they can understand, especially within a present context, how things that otherwise would be like very worthwhile pursuits, that self improvement, it can become something that's very destructive, you know, especially in, especially in times of real kind of spiritual disorder. It's also, you know, this is kind of the seeds of enlightenment thought, you know, I know everybody thinks of enlightenment thought is simply this kind of proto-jicominism or something, that's the wrong way to look at it. I mean, in part like yet was, but, you know, closet widths very much derived from that same tradition. And I mean, I made the point that not accidentally, that's really the only crushing contribution to the enlightenment enterprise. This is such a deliberate degree, but this idea that, well, military science, it's based on the science of failings and artillery and the positioning of, you know, the science, Combined arms, you know, it doesn't really have to do with virtue and heroism. That's really not the kind of thing that we abide from a scientific perspective and we know now that Warfare is this rational process that we implement with diplomacy fails in order to force certain outcomes according to this quantifiable paradigm. That leaves the pretty debased outcomes. And I'm not some kind of peacenick. I mean, I'm very, very, very far from that. But the kind of stuff people find most offensive about hypermodern warfare, you know, like the logic of the body count, nutrition strategy, where you literally calculated dead people as an input in order to devise a victory metric. Well, this derives from that kind of thinking, that homo reality. It reduces life to something that at scale and relative absolute terms is very grotesque, you know. And did people like Cyril and even, you know, contemporaries of these events in question, or at least men were abituated into the culture that was the progenitor of these things, you know, like, like xenophonism itself and like the Cittities, did they have an idealized view of these things? Yeah, they probably did. But again, I posit and they probably would too, those among them who were aware enough to do so, that, you know, you need these kinds of ethical poll stars and this kind of enduring model of what is virtuous in order to even devise, you know, some ideal concept of the Paulis, you know. And that really is what it was to be Greek, you know, it wasn't, you know, and again, like this, the concept of a, the human, there's not really an adequate way to translate it and simply vernacular, but the emperor way to think about it is that like an integral soul that essentially is the wellspring of all human activity. You know, this can't be bifurcated or understood to be, you know, the product and discrete aspects of, you know, the human nature, otherwise cultures suffers. And the highest values, you know, only can derive from a virtuous cultural learning. You know, so to do violence to that is, is to essentially do violence to the possibility of virtue itself, you know, and again, that's not something that can be singularly blame on sorrows, but he was the standard bearer of this phenomenon. And this is probably pretty far inside the scope, but one of the main functions of the penal law as a traditional understood is the sort of symbolic logic that attends a human sacrifice. And, you know, by exuding the man, assuming it's for a political reason, it's because you're repudiating what is the standard bearer of. It's not because you'll come directly responsible for a chain of causal events like you would some infamous felon or something who you're accusing of killing somebody, you know. And yeah, like modern people would claim that that's a deliberate injustice, but modern people do this all the time. And they do it in a really debased way. That's why they do things like sending Derek Shove into prison because he's some stand-in for this, like this kind of like pretend archetype of racial prejudice, which in their segment, human's mind is the ultimate evil. And this kind of poor, slob, George Floyd who died in police custody because he had all kinds of problems of a physiological nature. He's some stand-in for this like victim population that exists in their imagination. You know, and so by acting out this kind of like pantomime, but where like an actual human being is sent to prison for life, the view ahead is like the authority. You know, and again, that's like far far more debased than the three of us have heard it's sorrows, but I can't take it seriously when people act like the Athenians were like somehow afflicted by this like madness, born of military defeat. So they just picked on sorrows for no reason. And it's like you fuckers do this all the time. You do it in the most childlike stupid way. I was pulling up on it so I wouldn't do that, but I think it's important to convey where we're in. Oh, yeah. And you know, intrinsic to intrinsic to to all of this, I mean if you account for the fact that literally the government of the Paulists, the men who would have the assembly, they were you know, the adult male citizens who constituted the humanry in a Homeric Athens, you know, presumably things like a sound currency and fundamental fairness and a vigorous defense of the Paulists, but also a basically, you know, and again, I realize we're speaking in and in previously idealized terms. But who also like had, you know, kind of like modest needs and ambitions, you know, the economics as a xenophon called it of the household and thus of the battlefield, both of which are schools of command, you know, that weaves of virtue and politics. If you replace those men with either oligarchs or these alloof intellectuals of the kind who surrounded Socrates, you know, one of the what kinds of outcomes you're going to have, you know, you're going to have, you're going to have people in the case of the oligarchs, you're going to have people who have reduced in our terms the human condition and in Athenian terms, the virtue, the something vulgar and materially quantifiable as one would calculate progress on an evicus, like literally. In the case of intellectuals again, you're talking about people who probably have an active disdain for the kind of civic mythology and the virtue ethics that animates the majority of the body politic, you know, either way you're talking about a hostile elite and even if you weren't, you know, philosophers and oligarchs can't, they can't take you to war and win, you know, and even the wars you are doomed to lose are the fickleness of fortuna material conditions or anything else, but these are not men who are going to cultivate heroism nor be able to properly document the emergence of said heroism for posterity, you know, and thus you're really talking about an emergent political class or caste that in categorical terms is precluded from acting a virtual. And that's totally across purposes with the classical motion of state craft. You know, and because intrinsic to, as we talked about, the kind of the new dynamic, I mean, I mean, that's in value neutral terms. It's in terms of the velocity of social life and its processes. You know, in society's life, this kind of newly dynamic sociology was emergence. The guys who constantly with society students, these guys were urban elitists. You know, they were the guys who, they were the sons of businessmen. Or, they were the sons of generals, or, you know, men in command authority roles, who become wealthy enough so that their sons could pursue leisure. You know, these, these are the guys who'd taken power away from, or when the pros of actually subverting the sovereign authority of the Yale menry. And, you know, again, there's an axiomatic attempt there for the majority. You know, and again, we're talking about Athens, we're not talking about like a modern egalitarianism. You know, we're talking about people who are actually worthy of formal equality. You know, this was a very bad thing. You know, so the natural, the natural constituency of a so-credits elite are going to be men like themselves. You know, and, you know, it's system like that stands to, it stands to reproduce itself in perpetuity. Now, there was something to this too, like in the, I'm not suggesting that these guys were, had the same level of cultivation or something, obviously, but, when you look at the non-manclature of the Soviet Union, like post Stalin, you know, when, when they're kind of barefoot peasants, like literally he was a barefoot peasant, like cruise jiff, and that died off or been purged. You know, this kind of, this kind of class of political managers, there's something of a parallel there. You know, these guys, first, yeah, a lot of these guys, come up to design bureau, it was like maybe they had a good head for mathematics, maybe they understood architecture, maybe they understood, you know, military science, in the way that McNamara did, who was, you know, in large, much of their counterpart. But, a class of men whose job it is to literally be political managers, and like that's it. You know, that's one of the things that killed the Soviet Union. You know, and again, I'm always making the point, history does not repeat, but there's sociological permutations, only the limited numbers of variables within human power, paradigms, and social structures that do, that do reemerge. You know, a dedicated class of political managers, I go as far as I say, it's almost axiomatically inimical to the public good. And like a different than aristocracy, like a aristocrat where many hats. And they're not, they're, it's just a different situation. And the traditional complaint about aristocrats is that they're glory hounds, and that they're not particularly bright. Like they're guys who excel at warfare, or they're, you know, people who kind of stand on ceremony quite literally, and in the accoutrements of, of, of spectacle and things in order to sustain their mandate. But, you know, a curated intelligency of, even one that has aristocratic trappings, such as, the kinds of people we're talking about, who constituted the socrates' intellectual progeny, you know, that the fact remains, like the essential characteristics of these people are the same. You know, and again, the, um, also deities, or also bides, those cerellins, you know, fun, how they him out. As an example, a man who could, uh, absorb socrates' teachings, but then go back into the world, re-enter his command rule, and be better for it. But again, cerell's take is that, he absented in himself before he became fully corrupted by the, by the culture of, um, socrates' inner circle. This is, you know, fun, uh, the suggestion he was strong enough to, uh, take from philosophy, what, what lend itself, you know, to the school of command that was, that's what, you know, that, that, that civic life represented for, uh, Athenian men who were capable of, liberty and equality in a formal sense. But that's not realistic. You know, um, my layman's interpretation, um, and in classical studies, I'm very much a layman, is it's another example of the exception proving the rule. But, um, I'm going to stop myself now, because I want to move on a bit to, a somewhat different subject matter, and I can't cover that in five minutes. I didn't think he could. Yeah. Well, um, how's, um, you got anything to promote? What do we, uh, uh, is it documentary up yet? Yeah, yeah, so my substep, it's, uh, check out Thomas TV, man, like it's, uh, it's the, uh, Skinwalker Ranch adventure. Yeah, it's been, it's been popping pretty good. Like people seem to have really liked it. Um, and now, uh, I'll put it back on the main page if there's demand for it. But yeah, anybody, anybody can access it, who's a subscriber, man. I'm going to, I'm going to drop more video too. That's one reason I'm going off the West Coast, um, not imminently, but in the next few months, is, uh, like, record stuff. But, uh, yeah, this, and again, I want to apologize this past week, I, I basically told everybody that I, I mean, I, I recorded it if I don't want to stuff, but, um, I started feeling, I wanted to give myself kind of a break anyway, but I started feeling really, wowsy, um, so not a lot got, not a lot got done. And I, I'm not trying to be a weirdo, but I want to, I want to be accountable to people because I just do it for a few reasons. But also, it's the subs that, like, make all this possible. So, I'm not being responsive and not dropping fresh stuff. I, I feel like, what an explanation. What's many of, many of you are my friends. Um, but yeah, I, um, I'm going to be dropping, sub-sticks, the place to find me, that's where the podcast is, that's where my video content is, that's kind of my home online. It's, um, real Thomas, 777.subststick.com. Um, I'm on T-gram and Instagram. I got a, I got a very active Discord server now, which I'm very pleased about. And I owe the subs a great deal there too, because the other ones are making it pop. I'm going to start doing live streams every weekend. I was going to do it this weekend, but I felt, I felt too sick. Um, but Saturday night, we're going to start doing a stream, around 9 p.m. central time every Saturday, unless I'm on the road or otherwise, not well. Um, you know, like I said, I'm kind of restructuring my content, um, which is long overdue, but, Yeah, that's where you can find me. I'm on gig, but my T-Gram on my Instagram, but yeah, my home base is So yeah, that's what I got Awesome. All right, so part four. Thank you. Yeah, thank you, buddy I want to welcome everyone back to the Peking Yuna show Thomas is here. We're gonna pick up this series on continental philosophy part four You're right, Ed sir Yeah, I wanted to dive in today. I mean, we're we're going to dive in today too is a pleidel Played with the ill understood Ironically Because Play was only the foundation of Of the Western canon, okay Famously the postmodernists, you know if you know we're talking about not just in each of but You know, Hightaker show up on a horror Everybody all commentators derivative therein of that economic or intellectual canon You know they famously that the famous kind of lament or Critique of Plato is that Christianity is plagued is him for the people, okay? but even that sort of pejorative is misunderstood Okay, and the case of the Nicheans and Nietzsche himself It all do the it kind of nihilism that in dialectical terms, you know, Nietzsche believed was the inevitable you know outcome of Platonic discourse other people however most notably Carl Popper and Carl Popper his is a hugely significant figure especially in terms of post-Marxist liberalism You know Post-Marxist radicalism. I mean, you know if you prefer But the left like the contemporary left they view Plato as this sort of like a proto-fascist figure almost okay Soros's NGO his is flagship NGO is the open society institute that that's not just some Sort of exo-moniker Carl Popper he wrote this series of volumes called the open society and its enemies That really was his kind of a grand rebuttal in his view of Plato or is a grand indictment of Platonic ethics and his grand You know assault on on Western metaphysics, okay, so that That's one of the reasons I think exception to it. I mean, there's a lot of reasons why and I promise I'm not going on this some Primrose path tangent But that's one of the reasons I accept it when people refer to the regime as the cultural Marxist like they're really not Like do cultural Marxist exists like yeah, there's a minority of partisan so Essentially abide like the kind of stuff that grams in a Doran postulated, but that's not that's not like when we think of like Regime ideology that's not what we're talking about we're very much talking about in Brezdx terms Carl Popper and adjacent The sympathetic you know philosophical systems and paradigms and His big enemy if you want to look at it in those terms I'm being reductionist for the sake of coherency and brevity You know he he and they viewed Plato as this this figure of a great Of a very destructive Tenancies intellectually speaking You know, so that's something to keep in mind. I mean there's plenty of like reasons to critique Plato from the right but You know a lot of people must understand things and A lot of dilatantish Right-wingers who don't really understand The kind of discourse intellectual discourse around Plato they they seem to really They seem to really fail on this point. It's like what exactly the right right is objection is you know, and it's again It's not it's not except that I'll let the left despises Platenism and it's not just derivative of their anti-Christian posture It's adjacent to that, but it's something to scream and So that this part of organ again, it was probably going to take two to three episodes to fully flesh this out but notably classical historiography in terms of validating or authenticating you know statements by the punitive declarant is difficult And I'm not a classical scholar and nor is would that be our mission anyway in terms of this series But so when I speak of what's accepted as you know Indisputably according to the Commonly accepted criteria of classical scholarship when I declare what's accepted is the platonic dialogues I'm abiding what is you know the mainstream Sensibility Derivative of the aforementioned criteria. Yeah, okay. I'm sure people can argue that point this on I'm here to do okay, so again, and I don't prefer to be a classical scholar, but There's a grant to a 35 dialogues and 13 letters that have at various times Benessign to Plato as the source Okay, um Some classical scholars doubt if any of the letters Concha the dialogues of genuine so we're not even ideal with those because that's a whole complicated controversy right there and it doesn't really cut to the Prox of what we're talking about substance in a way anyway but the platonic dialogues is such that there there's an essential consensus You know and it has been for some time on What is valid and what is not you know we're gonna stick to the dialogues that are accepted universally as being you know from the pen of Plato as you were and Play those dialogues are interesting because That they're written is that they're written as dialogues Plato never writes in his own voice Now there's a few ways to interpret that You know you can interpret that as him so ironically acting as witness so that No sort of discrete thoughts system that you assigned to him which I don't accept that You can interpret it as Plato trying to cut a Divides like a monument literally to his hero and his patron Socrates Or when I think is most persuasive you can read it as well these dialogues were probably conversations and controversies and arguments that Plato himself a bar witness do and maybe he's combined certain aspects of discrete events You know, maybe he's combined the personalities of Certain declarance or identified as the source of some of this material I Think he probably wanted to make this readable you know to not to a mass audience, but to Educated cadre of men who would be you know not just sensitive to you know the importance of posterity of you know Athene and cultural intellectual products But also the kinds of people the kinds of men who would be receptive to you know Kind of a discursive process and Interesting we in all the planet dialogue. He's very clear about where this is taking place in the venue. Okay, this is Athens This is socrates participating You know, but he there's no dates on these Okay, um And that's significant okay because I think that Some people have said well obviously you know His big concern was with the conditions surrounding the Peloponnesian war and he's trying to paint for us a picture of a Culture and decline. I don't accept it. I mean yes, Athens wasn't precipitous decline then but When cultures are ascendant or when they're precipitously deteriorating if you stepped a spanglerian paradigm and I certainly do that's when the most kind of Ferment intellectual activity is going to be underway Owing to reasons that should be fairly obvious But I think I Think he didn't want his dialogues to be assigned to any sort of discrete Historical epoch within the broader paradigm of you know the the Athenian historical experience um and The Greeks were it's interesting because the spangler himself said You know the Greeks didn't have the same sense of historical time as Later Aryan derived civilizations did Specifically the Faustian civilization which is literally you know men against time Spangler suggested that the prime symbol of Athenian civilization was the sensuously present individual body like perfectly proportioned and You know in one of these freezes or one of these Stalkers or statuary you know the figure in question is situated in Hierolith a mist avoid you know the immediate sort of presence of uh Of the figure in question who symbolic of The culture that is the progenitor of them is what's most significant? You know there's not this fixation with the past or the future and Again, I'm not a classic scholar or some sort of expert in pre-Christian metaphysics, but I do know that the Greeks Had an understanding of the universe Their epistemology at grand scale was that You know reality is perennial it has no beginning or end You know and this is important. It's not just a kind of trivia that is compelling or that has aesthetic the sorts of You know qualities that lend insight into the cultural mind. This is actually important, but um Bring it back a little bit To political philosophy specifically Plato is hugely important on an account Disgratly of three dialogues those are the republic the statesmen and the laws The titles of which should be fairly self-explanatory um You know arguably pretty much everything that Plato Pretty much all the dialogues that we can According to the terms again of Of commonly accepted evidentiary criteria the dialogues we can indisputably assign to him arguably all those partake of political subject matter but No, it's relating directly and I'm called a phyly the political or the three that I just mentioned Okay The subject matter the republic Which is most significant in terms of political ontology as well as in terms of ethics What constitutes a good society and thus you know like a good Paulus and again to be clear there was no concept of state in Endora Gathins You know Arguably and this is a better side to scope Even the later medieval era and the early modern period the concept of of the state as we think of it didn't exist so however at least the primitive architecture in conceptual terms of it existed in the modern period in the ancient world that was not Even something that could be apprehended. It just simply didn't exist. Okay, and that's one of many One of myriad reasons why it's completely misplaced When these American polls or when these sort of midwit regime adjacent academics These people I've Victor Davis Hansen I call them venereal disease hands and I think that's more appropriate But like Neocons especially have like a fetish for this like declaring that somehow they're the errors to the Athenian tradition of statecraft or you know America is Post 1933 America is the heir to this like grand full circle tradition of government. That's totally off base like arguably What they are positing is the core tenets of You know good not just good government, but in the logical terms What constitutes the political arguably that's the opposite of what was being a posited by by Plato but moving on The subject matter of the Republic at base is what what constitutes justice like the nature of Justice The general theme is You know what constitutes essentially like a good society and they're in you know like what is what is like a good citizen? You know within that society and There's various interlocutors Who represents Not so much crudely drawn, but kind of rigidly characterized archetypes that we can imagine populating You know Athens during the time approximately the Peloponnesian War Okay, um It's obvious that the subject matter in The sort of broad terms is how do we restore political health to the Paulus? You know and again some people Like to interpret these three aforementioned dialogues is You know being born of a crisis modality. I don't agree with that like yes. I don't disagree that that's from those the conditions from Where these things were emerging, but that's not the purpose of them. You know, they're there too They're two universal in school. I mean universal in terms of Being cross culturally applicable or being egalitarian. I mean that these are absolutely partialist and not Nobody is suggesting not the characters within the dialogue nor Socrates himself as we can interpret socrates is sort of opinion to the pen of Plato You know none of them are saying well these these are rare conditions and this is an essential sort of emergent remedy No, they're saying that in absolute terms what's being proposed here is is Is absolute in all times and all places? The conversation and the republic It's a It opens with socrates talking to the follows The follows is like you know like the kind of cosmic respectable citizen of Athens He's very very old. He's very very wealthy and He's viewed as a wise man and he's constantly pious. He's not he doesn't drink success. He's not a womanizer He's not conspicuous with his wealth. You know, everybody knows that he's very very rich, but You know, he's he's been never linked individual It's the life he's lived and again. He's one of the he's one of the oldest men and Athens is Is a model of propriety So, Socrates, presumably Socrates is a mastery in conceptual terms. If not in his own life, he has mastery of what costumes the good, but what he can learn from Kaffalo says, "What is it like to be very old? What is it like to have your perspective over time?" And over many phases of a, as we think of it, historical development and things of this sort. So that's what, that's what Socrates could conceivably learn from him. Because not just the role Socrates plays in the dialogues, it's not just, I mean, and a lot of people perceive this kind of like, "Oh, this is Plato's Hegeography of Socrates, it's not just that." I mean, yeah, obviously that's like a component of it, although I suggest it's more complex than a lot of people, including classical scholars, would have admittedly known more than I do in the subject matter. It's more nuanced than they allow, but Socrates is sort of the omnipotent orbiter, like in these dialogues. So it's like, what could he learn from Kaffalo as well? Socrates is not tremendously elderly. He doesn't have the same vantage point. And even if he can apprehend these things intellectually, he hasn't lived in very long a way. So that's what he can learn. That's the key sort of aspect of it. But in the course of their discussion, Kaffalo's essentially declares that, "Well, what virtue is is always telling the truth." Okay? The way we can distinguish justice from injustice is essentially by this sort of primitive integrity. Okay? He seems to imply that justice is synonymous with always telling the truth and always paying back what somebody has received from another. You know, whether we're talking about in business, in personal affairs, in war and peace, you know, and sorry, this is a rebuttal that is like, well, telling the truth and returning another means of property isn't always just. You know, there's nuances here, especially in times of war or crisis. You know, it's not simply reducible to these things. And this time, for example, where it's necessary to not just in the case of children or easily excitable classes of people and not just heal us. It's important to invoke convictions or lies for the greater good. Or there's times where one might owe a man a debt of honor or money. But, you know, it's why they resist that man in his endeavors or to enrich him further would lead to, you know, unjust outcomes because of what he plans to do. You know, there's myriad conceivable outcomes or iterations whereby this sort of absolute pole star of just honesty and paying one's debts can't be said to constitute justice or the good. Subsequently, as Gafalos is savaged in some basic sense by Socrates' rebuttal, Polamarchos who is Gafalos son, like takes up the mantle. What he suggests is often interpreted falsely as a kind of, to represent a kind of primitive communism. You know, we could say that Karl Popper's punitive interpretation of plateenism is that it's quasi-fascist and it's a weirdism. You know, people on the other extreme but equally prone to punitive critique, trying to extrapolate these sort of like modern and postmodern characteristics to these dialogues. And that's misguided for all kinds of reasons. And we can't talk about modern political paradigms as applied to the republic. I mean, regardless of yes, the one I dialogue is the progenitor of political theory in the West, but that's not what I'm talking about. You know, and it should be clear that, you know, nuance is what bridges the ancient past to the contemporary or modern conditions. Polamarchos says that what constitutes the good and absolute terms is that which is salutary. Okay, not only do they give her a bit to the receiver, you know, and again, intrinsic to that suggestion is the fact that giving to a man what rightfully belongs to him can sometimes be harmful to him. You know, not all men judge wisely. If justice is fundamentally salutary and that it causes a reciprocal goodness, you know, that equates to in practical terms is that every man should only own or control what is like fitting for him or what is good for him. And this is where that critique of this being proto-communist comes in because that would seem to intrinsically demand the revelation of private property, you know, and there needs to be some arbiter whether it's literally like a sovereign adjudicator or whether it's some sort of core principle or set of principles that can calculate these things and not just through a medial but spontaneous way, you know, that would assign not just material goods but relative power of a social and political nature in the most equitably efficient terms, you know, and axiomatically that would equate to a conclusion that extremely few people would be able to determine widely across, you know, caste and discrete circumstance like what constitutes like an equitable distribution of these goods. You know, and I would seem to imply again, either some sort of enlightened dictatorship or some sort of cadre which in contemporary terms would, or 20th century terms specifically would suggest some sort of, you know, party apparatus that is rendering these decisions. And again, that's the wrong way to look at it for a lot of reasons but it's also even within a boundary rationality and we even within the temporal, you know, window of when this discourse is taking place, the conclusion of sovereignty/plato neutralizes any interpretation of this as communist, that could fundamentally egalitarian. just a second. What's Saturday's Rebunnel is basically is that yes, that would tend to imply the rule of the philosophers. You know, um, and when we're talking about any discrete polity, we've got a disregard any sort of abstract understanding of the good. Because yes, like derivative of practical reason, there are some things that are absolutely good and some things that are absolutely bad. But what constitutes an equitable distribution can't be reduced in political terms, okay? Can't be reduced to postulates abstracted from concrete circumstances. Um, and furthermore, one of the things that separates the president analysis that a poor Marcos from his father, Kaffalas. The follows have seemed to imply that his opinion is linked in his mind with the view that, well, injustice is bad because there's bad karma that attaches to it. And inextricably bound up with that is the fact that after death, bad things will befall the soul as well as the living descendants of the man who is prone to this sort of bad action. Um, Paul Marcos, this plays an overall in his take on this. Um, his view that, justice must be salutary, both to the giver and the receiver, is strictly a worldly calculus. Um, furthermore, reducing it from any sort of egalitarian paradigm, that's absolutely you know, applicable according to what is presumably universal paradigms of inequity that are common to all human societies. Paul Marcos opinions tempered by the understanding that one should ultimately be guided by hoping one's friends and harming one's enemies in political terms. Again, this has been we're not talking about personal criteria, although it's certainly possible for somebody's personal enemy to also constitute, you know, a political hostile. Um, and Socrates agrees with that. And Socrates openly states that that's what can be understood to be civic responsibility is the fellow feeling one has not just for, you know, their family and their for their personal friends and their neighbors, but for the Paulists. And wanting, you know, justice to be realized within that, you know, fellow feeling community. And essentially, you know, the the moral imperatives that surround these positive duties to one's friends, not only to the end at the boundaries of the Paulists, but you have an obligation to not assist those outside the Paulists. You know, even if they're not enemies. So that um, this is where Plato, according to people like Popper, to bring it back to the point of minute ago, this is the big critique of the open society. You know, I'm simplifying the sake of brevity and we'll get more into this as time goes on. But uh, that's what's being discussed. And interestingly, one would think this goes without saying any dead kind of in terms of people's instinctive concepts. I mean, such that, you know, we're talking about the class of people or the cast of people. We're capable of understanding politics and political matters, the theoretical level. This would go without saying, but Plato went to the trouble through the mouthpiece of Socrates to explicate this in terms that are not discreetly limited to the Paulists in which he was situated. Now, finally, fascinating. And it's just to that this was being written for the sake of posterity. You know, not just immediate posterity like well, Socrates is not long for this earth. You know, and uh, certainly Plato is uh, somebody who is bearing witness to the events of the Paul Panagian War and that, you know, the sort of transgressions actually perceived, the like the Socrates being a veiled-do punitive justice and ultimately executed. You know, he wasn't he wasn't as guarding the record as it were. He was transcribing these things and creating these narratives, you know, and it's not for me to say like, how much of this was creatively confagulated and how much was word for word what he bore witness to in terms of the testimony of the alleged declares, but there was an understanding that in my opinion that anybody would kind of come away with, have to read the Republic of the posterity, play what in mind was for all time. And that's remarkable. But um, moving on. Sorry. I'm buried under wires. But uh, yeah, so I mean, if we understand, in its simplest terms, the the the the the just man gives to his friends, what is good for them. And uh, the the the the just man helps his friends himself and his Paulus by, you know, only only only acting a hard nose where his enemies in a public and and political terms. Um, Socrates then he starts invoking these loose metaphors, which seems to suggest that justice is an art like a medicine. It's not it's not it's not a science. So there might be like scientific aspects to it. It's going to be clear the way that Athenians start off science was fundamentally different than the way that in the course in Lademan, Mire is the one. This is actually significant. We'll get into that moving foreign. But um, you know, it requires a man to be able to identify um, what is best for the body politic at any given moment. I mean, it goes without saying that what is best and absolute terms has to be a guiding imperative. But any given moment, like what is best for the Paulus literally like the body of the Paulus, you know, has to be diagnosed and identified and delicately remedy depending on the circumstances. Um, thus like what is it's not it's not adequate to declare that justice must merely be salutary. You know, there's there's got to be a curative and uh, and cultivated understanding of what's going to facilitate the good. You know, and obviously too, if we're reducing this the personal criteria which Paul and Margo's alludes to by version of the fact that he's not sophisticated either as his father could follow his or so. There are some individual men who aren't really capable of benefiting from justice. Even if they are people who we share fellow feelings for, and even if they're not dead men in objective terms, so again these kinds of mechanistic criteria can't really be applied the human condition. And that's actually a very kind of proto-Christian understanding obviously, and throughout the Platonic dialogue, there's a lot of that. I mean, in this isn't, I'm not being punitive at all, but one notices, especially my Roman Catholics, there want a lot of the time to invulking platonic rationalizations for things. I'm not really fully realizing that. There's nothing wrong with that. I've got a lot of love for Roman Catholics. I'm the sectarian minority on the ground. I'm not just here, but with the fellows I click up with, they're overwhelmingly Catholic, or antigenography, other things. Well, this is highly significant, and we'll get into a quietness in coming weeks in this series, and we'll get into the tie that binds the classical to the modern and the ancient heritage of Athens to Christiandom and Faustian civilization, if you will. With the caveat that again, I'm not any kind of classical scholar or anthropologist, but I, if you bear with me, I'm not talking about the subs and everybody, I think I'll be able to devise a worthwhile outline. Essentially, what this resolves in, this secondary dialogue between psychrotees and phallomarchos, and inclusion that, well, owing to what I just stated about the psychrotees, understanding the epistemic aspects of what constitutes a good citizen. Really the only men who can stand in absolute judgment of the Paulus and curate the epistemic aspects of the human race, are the guardians. The guardians are basically the sort of philosopher kings that people, bandy, in the colonial terms, when discussing Plato and the Platonic ideal. That's not really the best way to think of it, because Plato more than anybody, because he's immersed in the life of the Lyceum and whatever. Plato doesn't say, so we can discern his own views on the good life and on what is puttically sound. He's not saying that, you know, psychrotees is the greatest man or that philosopher is the greatest man. He's almost 10 amounts, so what Nietzsche said about the messianic personage in historical terms, not theological to be clear, who would be aware of the fact that all preceding value systems were mere horizons of a conceptual nature. Nietzsche famously said that the common redeemer would be Caesar with the soul of Christ. It's a little bit substantially less apocalyptic, what Plato was suggesting, but essentially what would need to be curated in the ideal republic are men of action and men who have an instinctive view of what constitutes the good. Not unlike what Serelle said was the pre-socratic ideal in terms of what constituted good life and what constituted a civic morality, but obviously Plato was talking about what we'd think of as a cultured, very stratum, you know, and they're required a more complex and kind of complete understanding of, you know, historical phenomena and processes, but, you know, I think, and again, people welcome this degree. We're not talking about philosophy, philosophy of kings. We're talking about a cultured, very stratum that is self-consciously aware of, you know, the manner in which conceptual ethics and historical mandate deteriorates over time as people simply take the configuration of the Paulus from Rantids and believe that, you know, justice and truly cosmic terms, you know, whether we're talking about, you know, in the midst of the Peloponnesian War, a bunch of Athenian assemblymen were deciding themselves the fact that, well, this isn't a hands of fortuna or the gods, or whether we're talking about, you know, today where people just have this kind of faith and, you know, this kind of faith and like endless material prosperity whereby, if uncertainty is, by way, a technological innovation and the regularization of commerce and things at scale, you know, we can just kind of rely upon, like, the internal logic of these systems to, you know, sort of guard not as a prosperity, but a way of life that sort of cows within parameters of reason, even if only because, you know, the systems that facilitate the effulment of prosperity, you know, we're derivative of reason and that means that, you know, it would be self-defeating for anybody to step verbally or literally outside of those things or try to sabotage them, you know, this is a very, very real thing and it's not just, it's not just effluenza of, with the malaise of, of, you know, success or whatever people like to assign, or whatever cause people like to assign to crisis, crises of morals in the modern state, you know, or as they extrapolated those same phenomenon to Asian conditions and trying to interpret what exactly was underway during the Peloponnesian War, you know, this is, this is fundamentally important, but moving on. You know, sourdys goes as far and again, this is key because, and this is, you know, again, I realized I'm cranking back a lot to Carl Popper, who was a very sinister personage, but the key to understanding a lot of the present regimes. ideological fetishes as well as its priorities. You know, Popper was famously a huge proponent of scientism. That was the volume of the opens of sighting and incentives that gives a play though. I think it's volume two. I got to check that. I actually have it on my bookshelf. But his big, what he viewed as his kind of big trump card was declaring that any borrowed from a lot of the same canon that John Rolls-in suggesting that, well, you know, anybody who's interested in devising an equitable social paradigm realizes that we can plan society if not down to the most minute-descrede detail. We can basically plan an economic and sociological terms to eliminate the most egregious injustices. And one of the reasons why all these people like Plato and all these Christians and all these conservatives, one of the reasons why they were unable to improve upon human well-being was because they were operating according to myths that weren't falsifiable. And this was a lot. This was what Renegio was talking about when he talked about scientism. You know, people like Popper weren't talking about science. They were talking about beliefs and these sort of mythological postulates, which is ironic because they're all, their whole, um, raison d'etreaux is going on declaring that everybody else was sort of taken in by this retrograde mythology. But like, scientism isn't science. What scientism is, is it's a belief structure based on certain scientific postulates, which from there, you know, the adherence of this declare that, well, the only way of knowing is truly, you know, the methodology of science and anything outside of that. Well, you're drawing upon things other than bearer matter, you know, which again, the existence, which can't be proven according to these criteria that I or we have assigned is the only way of, you know, acquiring absolute knowledge. So, you know, this is, this is just a recipe for tyranny because the only way we can know anything is this methodology that, you know, was just aforementioned. And, um, there's so many problems with that. It's almost difficult to discern where to begin. And so, like, it's like playing with the role playing games where it's like, you're fighting a hydra or something with like a thousand headphones. And it's like, which head do you try to cut off first? You know, um, but people find that superficially really persuasive. That is changing now. I might add and, uh, I'm the first to point out that, uh, anybody, anybody who goes around saying like, oh, well, religion is dead. And now, you know, we understand that these progressive posh looks were correct. People like that are totally out of touch. I mean, just like an objective terms. And there's been only a time on a Reddit where they haven't read a book, um, a fresh vintage in the last 25 years. Like, like, nobody believes in that anymore. And that's dead. Like, whether, whether anybody likes that or not, that's totally dead. Like the current paradigm. I mean, first of all, what one of the things that shocked everybody as the cold war was ending was that it was, it was, it was, it was negatively theological imperatives that were taking down the socialist community and nations as they called themselves. But the way to understand things these days, I'm Mr. Globalism, aside from the fact that the primary lockeye resistance are in places that are are animated by, by theological principles. Like for, for better or worse, whatever many things about this, the Russian Federation, they view themselves as being a vanguard of Christian Dom against a profoundly evil secularism. You know, did all like Darrell Islam. Okay. Like, this is reality. Whatever people think about either the, you know, discrete belief systems that the primate and some of these territories are what do people think about religion generally? Like this is reality. Anybody who doesn't understand that doesn't understand the last 40 years in terms of world's durable phenomenon. But, um, you know, that's, um, this entire sort of, it's not just that Roman Catholicism became this formative, you know, aspects of continental Europe that Plato sort of became the starting point of Western metaphysics as we think of it. It's, um, it's because that's fundamentally, you know, a highly sophisticated, theological worldview. And the syncronism of Christianity of the kind that, uh, you know, the Merva Ringeans in the early, I thought in political terms, okay, to be clear, right? I'm not saying that, you know, the, what the, the, I'm not saying these political cultures, somehow, we're more theologically sound or sophisticated than the early church fathers. But there's a reason why there was this sort of ready, um, acceptance, the syncronism between plateenism and the early Roman church. You know, um, and it wasn't just a matter of men who coveted power and the ability to sort of mold like a nascent, political culture that spanned literally a continent into, you know, something that was coherent and in line with their own peculiar, um, vision of what constituted, you know, the good and human life at oriental scale, you know, it was, uh, way more historically situated than that and frankly, profound. But, uh, yeah, it looks like we're right about an hour, man. That was rambly. Forgive me. Like it's, uh, there's a lot here. And we'll, uh, I'll be more focused, uh, in the next episode. And we'll, we'll get into kind of more of what's significant about Plato, um, especially as regards, you know, the, uh, the Christianization of the conment, uh, without getting ahead of ourselves. But yeah, well, uh, we'll, we'll finish up Plato next time, man. I hope this wasn't too skater shot. No, no. Please tell everybody where they can find you. Um, did you, have you had another, uh, incident with another platform? I mean, discord. Nuke does, I kind of anticipated that, um, the discord thing was an experiment. Like I know, discord is run by like gay, for reasons stuff. Like I, but I, I want to find us a short forum like chat home where I can also like live stream. Discord is kind of the, the normie sort of, uh, platform like that. And I wanted to get habituated to those kinds of servers, because honestly, I haven't like really used them before. But I, I'm going to continue with our, our, our Saturday streams this Saturday. I'm probably just going to stream from substack and I'll shout it out tomorrow when I decide where I'm going to shout it out from. But I, I've got a bunch of the fellows have been suggesting other, uh, platforms, alternative to discord, where the hosting isn't as problematic in terms of sincerious actors and what have you. Well, I'll have this figured out in the next several days. I just, I had a busy week. like preparing for the OGC kind of play, then you know, working on my manuscripts and other things. But I promise I'll have it figured out by this weekend and I sell like permanent capacity. But yeah, it both makes me define me. My online home is sub-stair. It's real Thomas 777 that's sub-stairing that. That's what the podcast is. That's what I like my short to medium length form stuff is. You know, I'm on Instagram. I'm, you know, our friends like Pete here and like Jay Burton. They're kind of to offer me a plan from regularly. But you know, I've got my own podcast. Then I do a bi-weekly current event show with Jay Burton called Radio Free Chicago. Yeah, check out the sub-stair again from there. You'll kind of get a sense of where to find all my content and I, this is a period of transition for giving me the fact that things are kind of up in the air. But it's, I promise this will be for the best man. And in the coming days and weeks, like, well, we'll be more accessible. - All right, until part five, thank you. I wanna welcome everyone back to the Picanjana show. We're here for part five, Continental Philosophy. Thomas, what's happening? How you doing, man? I'm doing okay. I realize that literally the subject of this series is kind of awful. Well, I was the fee really a capital C. But I'm gonna have to spend time with Thomas Hobbs. First of all, that Hobbs is in dialogue with the Continental Tradition. And he's a counterpart to Machiavelli. If you wanna understand modern political philosophy, there's a really good book that Leo Strauss wrote on this. And Strauss' scholarship, that's not of a polemical character is actually really good. I maintain he was like an important academic, okay? But if you wanna understand, wanna reuse what Carl Schmidt was so much in dialogue with Hobbs, I think of Schmidt's relationship to Hobbs as being not unlike Mars's relationship to Hegel. It's complicated. But we're gonna have to talk about Hobbs and Machiavelli. And I'm gonna tackle Hobbs first because in a lot of respects, I think he's the more significant theorist, especially considering, you know, the guiding ideology of the political monoculture of globalism. And Hobbs is ill understood by people. Like some people view him as this kind of tepid reactionary, who's just making concessions to what became enlightenment chivalrous. You know, other people view him as sort of a theorist of crisis actors. Not those things are really true. You know, and also, one of the reasons why the political culture of the UK tells us things, especially for somebody who's proverbial stock and trade, as regards their research, concentration, as compared to politics. There's a microcosm of what happens on the continent in many ways in the British Isles. And the 30 years war didn't touch and concern the UK. Obviously, like it did, the continent, but the war of three kingdoms, there's a lot of common causes, so bleak to what was happening across the English channel. And the ascendancy of Cromwell, Cromwell was very much a Mohammed or Ed O'Fitler, an Epolyan type figure. I'd say that he was, in fact, sort of the splendid example of that archetype. And Cromwell was a great man, you know, but beyond the obvious fact of his significance, the paradigms of a historical and conceptual character that created him are highly significant to anybody who seeks to identify ultimate causes in processes of mind and the ongoing phenomenon of conceptual discourse that creates political reality. So we're gonna dive into Hobbes. But this is also the next one. We're gonna dive into Hobbes and Machiavili. For context too, if you read people like John Muir-Shimer, these are neo-realist types, they claim, like I said at the outset of this series, that people like to sit at these, you know, we're presented at tenancy towards realism. That's nonsense. However, in the case of Hobbes, they like to claim as well, it's somewhat less off base. There's something to that. Hobbes was a mathematician at base. And something I've noticed that people don't fully understand unless they grew up reading the King James Bible and stuff like that. When Hobbes talks about geometry, he's talking about all of mathematics. He's also talking about physics and physical sciences. You know, that was kind of the convention of academia at the time. And it's also relevant because one of the things that was happening at this point is during the scientific revolution and the proto-enlightenment and beyond was that general knowledge, what there to forward, considered general knowledge was bifurcating. But it hadn't fully been, the verbal schisms hadn't fully classified yet. So basically, when Hobbes says geometry, he's talking about mathematics, theoretical and practical, and he's talking about physics, okay? Hobbes is an intuitive dialogue with Aristotle. And the key to that is his ontological description of what it is for man to live in nature and we'll get to that in a minute. But Hobbes viewed his mandate as well as his mission, as it was to cultivate a scientific basis of political and ethical philosophy. And this is the first time anybody'd really attempted this. Okay. Now, that's got certain implications, not the least to which is that it essentially calls for extricating any ambition. It's a perfect man or to force political ethics to comport with what is otherwise understood to be a virtuous soul and conduct arrive therein. It's brutally pragmatic. And Hobbes goes even further and suggests that moral evaluations are basically extrapolated from these kinds of instinctive things of a pragmatic nature. And the kind of progeny of a reason within any like man capable of it is that, you know, he's acting in his own self-interest. And that doesn't mean he doesn't have any attachments or genuine feelings born of passions, not reason. But it means that when he acts politically and civically in total sociological terms, any action he takes is basically self-interested. And what he reports to be a reciprocal abiding of duties, it more derives from a kind of non-aggression pact to further that self-interest with other similarly situated individuals than it does any sort of higher moral imperative. We'll get into what's wrong with that, probably in the next episode, but just laying foundation. We're getting a little bit ahead of what I wanna cover in linear terms. But obviously the challenge therein, vis-a-vis that first posh-it, how to cultivate and curate a scientific basis of political philosophy. There's gotta be some sort of basis for civic society that is permanent, that can coexist with that first posh-it, and mitigate what otherwise would be the proverbial war of all against the law. doll and possibly the literal war of all against the all. So some kind of some kind of ambition within the individuals who constantly the body politic and make them a stake and have just you their animized individuals in their natural state. So I'm sort of impulse towards fulfillment of civic duty incident to active citizenship has to be cultivated. And this is a no mean fee. Now this is also kind of the birth of analytic philosophy in my opinion as we think of it. Because the way has reactionalizes what I just said and the way he approaches that paradigm of how to reconcile these apparently conflicting tendencies is by modeling sovereign authority and the essential characteristics of sovereignty on a kind of systemic discourse. Now two hubs what was always most imperative whether we're talking about how to inculcate the body politic with civic responsibility or how to define the parameters of sovereign authority and describing what its essential characteristics are. He was always fundamentally concerned with tethering the practical and ethereal state craft or ethical philosophy. He considered it a vital imperative that it comport essentially splendidly with with praxis. Okay. This is very much at odds with in some ways and this is the opposite of the classical orientation and Machiavelli made that same point although his purpose is were totally different. Then he was addressing a totally different audience. You know which is significant. It's not it's an essential ways. The other words, I was looking for the right way to describe this. Machiavelli, he viewed the Aristotelian model as aiming too high. You know when in fact politics is base and the political realm which is a discrete steer of human activity. The currency of it is violence at the end of the day and it is power activity in ontological terms. Hobbes' view was really that of the mathematician. And again, like how busy in geometry is basically pro-analytic philosophy. Hobbes wasn't concerned with whether it was too lofty than ambition to curate virtue within the political. His view was that it's not going to do with praxis and it doesn't mitigate the war of all against all. So what uses it? You know it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it would be like arguing over like the aesthetic beauty of numbers or something. In lieu of actually devising, you know formulas that can create a bridge or a house that you know can stand up to. Wethering tensions and things like that. You know in some ways I go as far as I say Hobbes' paradigm is substantially more brutal than that of Machiavelli. And I think people don't understand that because in their view like they don't understand that the the the kind of core philosophical curriculum of progressiveism is actually a very brutal ideology. I go as far as to say it's anti-human. Okay it's not like people have this idea that like well they take liberal stuff. So what's like for pussy use or something? Yeah there's only an aspect of it especially considering we live in age of conceptual literacy. But the original progressives they kind of original enlightenment utopian types they don't know problem with killing huge numbers of people in order to realize the supposedly sort of like perfect geometry of the political. You know and that's there's something pretty monstrous about that just as an aside. But you know it's also to this not Hobbes is credited with this egalitarianism and Magnum is fake like Contra Aristotle he completely rejected the ontology of you know then you know men who were like naturally fit to command and the natural sleeve. But he didn't do that because he thought that like there was equal dignity to like all people. He said that because he said there's a basic equality within within violence. Okay because any man can kill another man you know if he's cunning enough and if he's ruthless enough and if he's in corral enough allies for the immediate task at hand like basically equality within the political realm is you know it belongs to it's an equality of violence. Okay so an equality the capacity to commit murder. And it's not going to do with like the intrinsic dignity of the human being or anything like that. Francis Bacon echo echo some of this or it's echoed in both bodies of work. Like Bacon claim that Aristotelian politics was imaginary laws for imaginary commonwealths you know so there's a self-consertiation of the classical view of the political you know but that again that doesn't mean it make it liberal in the contemporary sense or anything like that but this is the basis for this kind of rejection of what that afforded been you know the the basic understanding of human nature and his intrinsic sociality and him being born to an identitarian structure and being born to a palace in the terms of you know the source material you know so in other words the true roots of human behavior aren't really historical in nature they're basically mathematical or geometric the how busy and view in Leviathan which is what we're concerned with is Leviathan is that it's not a waste of time or irrelevant to study the historical record and even to identify processes they're in but this has nothing to do with identifying the proximal ultimate causes of human behavior or identifying what the sources are of passions that translate to violence of a political nature you know so what Hobbes suggests in lieu of you know both what Plato did in the Republic as well as Aristotle did in the Nicomachian Ethics and the politics by saying that you know philosophy if we accept that philosophy as a science and that politics is within that penumbra and thus is you know like a subcategory of that scientific discipline that you know there's one of two ways to proceed with identifying what are the basis of human action you know individually or collectively one of those ways is what Hobbes called synthetically which in brass text turns involves identifying or reasoning out the generating causes of human action and tracing the process to apparent effects of those motives and causes. The second aspect or method of identifying these core impulses is what he called "resilutive" or in plain English "analytical" which is basically deductive. Okay, and this becomes important as I'll get to in a minute. The resolution of the analytical begins with effects. Identifies the facts that constitute the essential aspect of those effects. And then traces possible causes of their generation, you know, based on the totality of quantifiable variables and the conditions in which they're situated. How is this possible considering, you know, most people consider to be the political and the metaphysical aspects that go into it? Pops and say there are no metaphysical aspects there. You know, the first principles of all things, it'll find its body or matter, you know, and how motion, change of place and self-directed action bears on, you know, that matter. Like that doesn't mean a house was saying that there's not such a thing as a domain of mind. But he's saying that we're, you know, again, the the praxis of political science has to line up with the theory of human action, you know, and basically he's talking about war and peace, okay? Because that's really all that the political is concerned with as regards the human condition. And the political is always the business of war and peace. It's not, you know, it's not how to make men better. It's not how to identify what virtue is, you know, in the palace or in a man or in a woman and how to curate these things, it's none of that. You know, it's how to identify the source of human passions that animates men to violence, how to mitigate those things or at least channel those energies constructively. And while doing that, how to prevent the deterioration into a kind of superficially dignified brutishness that, you know, simply addresses up nakedly ambitious violence as some sort of noble endeavor, you know, and how do we accomplish these things? Well, inculcating people with a kind of civic responsibility that makes active citizenship into something that is beneficial to all the individuals who collected, we make of the body politic. Well, at the same time, creating a strong enough civic apparatus that can fend off enemies from without, like we haven't even gotten to how this translates to preparedness and waging war against or deterring external enemies. We're only talking about essentially how to manage civil society and generate what we know of as, you know, a functioning state where, you know, not aggression is what reigns between the otherwise animized individuals who constitute the body politic. We haven't even gotten to, you know, questions beyond that. So this is complicated, but it is internally logical, even if one rejects it outright. You know, the, and of course, what I think of as, if we can think of, to draw an impertinent analogy, if we can think of niche as concept of eternal recurrence, it's got his counterparts, his counterparts, horrible and purative. Got enough hobbies, you encounter part to both. Would be or rather, or perfectly, Hobbes is a version of I think they're for I am. If it was put to Hobbes, or this paradigm is challenged by, well how can you be able to speculate about the passions of other men and what concepts of things Hobbes would say, well, every rational man possesses passions of one sort or another, he can identify what, you know, within the parameters, the bound of parameters of reason, he will do to satisfy or accomplish things that will save those passions. So essentially, you have a living example within your own mind and heart of what the human condition is. And inductively, you can extrapolate things about humans from that. And this is universal because Hobbes would say, in rebuttal to people saying, well what about sectarian motives, what about people who are situated in different tasks paradigms that doesn't matter because again, we're talking about the political, but we're not talking about people's view of what is good. We're not talking about somebody's like aesthetic judgments and the quality of violence is what renders this universal, you know, and again, I, there's serious problems with this, with this entire paradigm, but there's something too a lot of what is being said. And that's why Schmidt obviously rejected outright the this, the habisian description of the state of nature, you know, Schmidt viewed the first community as the folk community. That's the pre-rational, um, identity and criteria. However, you know, Schmidt also said that Hobbes was the greatest political scientist who ever lived, you know, and I, I don't totally disagree, you know, so this is important. And I'll also add, I realize I'm jumping around a bit. One of the things that the kind of current, I sort of midwid political science academies right about to, you know, during the Cold War, a lot of attention was paid to Hobbes, especially what he had to say about political psychology and the economy of violence, you know, and this, this is really the basis of game theory is applied to conflict paradigms, you know, this is very important, you know, and anybody, anybody who's learned, um, in this subject matter who picks up Levayat then, it'll start to jump out at, um, where they've seen these, where they've seen these claims and postulates and these analogies pop up again and again, you know, and all kinds of discrete sources. So it's not, it's not just a matter of kind of developing a conceptual picture, the history of political theory or something. It's important to read Hobbes for all kinds of reasons. So, you know, and I go as far to say too, and I'll move on in a minute, um, anybody who reads my stuff, I think that serves and I'm a radically inductive thinker, and that's probably exacerbated by the fact that, you know, I, I was a lawyer and legal reasoning, tends to be highly inductive, but that, uh, this is a bit outside the scope, but if you accept that the Hobbesian claim that politics is basically a subcategory of, of geometry, you know, and, and, and is a science into itself, it's essential that one proceed inductively in order to reach conclusions about the human condition, which is its subject matter, the variables being humans and their capacity for violence and everything that is associated with that. And for the reasons I just enumerated, that that's implicitly inductive, you know, this is the only way relevant data can be derived that could line up the theory. with praxis, which within the Habeasy and Puritim is the ultimate objective of political science. You know, an arguably of analytic philosophy in the total sense, but, you know, and by, but also by looking into oneself, you know, there's predictive, that's really your only like moment to moment living model of a human mind where one can overcome the barriers of, you know, the idea of sin received thought because obviously you can't see into another man or woman's mind. You know, you can speculate about things. You can, there's predictable nuances and observable variables, the human behavior, but there are no absolute indicators, but somebody is capable of stepping outside themselves for the purpose of inductively discerning and identifying the core variables of political behavior. You know, you do have a kind of moment to moment model in your own mind and that's not naval gazing that's not, you know, um, positing oneself at the center of things. There's nothing like that. Again, the qualifier is somebody who's capable of stepping outside themselves as a scientist does, you know, and we're speaking about a discrete domain of human activity. You know, we're not talking generally about like what food you like or what kinds of women you find pretty. You're, or whether you like the Las Vegas readers, you know, um, and this is key. Also, you know, you've got to look at the political as a discrete domain of human activity. You know, and this is another thing that separates Hobbes from contemporary liberals that they don't understand this. You know, um, those that did in the past outright rejected that, but I, you know, that, that distinction has been abolished. So there's that too. Um, Hobbes is a type of theorist that doesn't really exist anymore in all kinds of ways, but, um, you know, so at the end of the day, human behavior to Hobbes, it's not this, the platonic hierarchy of, you know, reason, will and passion and obviously Freud. I mean, Freud was a con man, but he was also just kind of like a, a, a simple, mighty plagiarist. You know, reason, will and passion is super ego, ego, id, okay? But Aristotle essentially abided that despite, you know, his political ontology, basically deviating from the Platonist model. And this, this was the classical understanding, you know, and Hobbes says, no, no, no, no, human behavior is primarily a mechanistic psychology of the passions, okay? Um, as applied to the political. Those are the forces that free rationally animate them. You know, now, of course, man being capable of reason, he'll devise rational ways and calculated ways to, again, like, say the hungers, um, figurative and literal, the born of these passions, but the core animating principles and phenomenon are what, are what, so to speak, pushes him from behind. You know, it, these aren't the product of like rational contemplation. You know, and how one ranks the, uh, objects of this passionate, covetousness that's going to vary from man to man, you know, and again, like any given man's constitution, education, social standing. This tends to obscure things to some degree, but not really because anything that is realizable in the political realm, you know, again, our currency is violence. There's not infinite ways to configure violence to derive some sort of a war or a table of seating, anything, anything, anything to spectra, I'm going to lit me up passions, you know, and obviously the constant going to this too, in political terms, you know, Hobbes, posits that is positing rather that good and evil have nothing, these are just words that characterizes desires and other versions and how these things can be realized or avoided by way of political activity, which is again, violence and the economy of violence. You know, um, so it's meaningless to talk about, you know, what constitutes a virtuous activity in the political realm. Now, it's not to say there's not narrative convention, it's not to say it's good to be needlessly violent, but Hobbes would again say, you know, in returning to the harmony between theory and praxis, it doesn't matter anyway because what we're worried about is outcomes and even if the only reason why, you know, a political actor shows restraint is because he doesn't want to be available to reciprocal violence of a boundlessly, you know, uninhibited nature that doesn't matter. It doesn't matter what his motives are so long as there's basic compliance with the normative strictures, tailored to maintain, you know, a permanent peace within the body politic, which constitutes civics society, you know, or at least permanent as much as it is feasible. You know, um, so subtly also to be clear, Hobbes is structuring his arguments at least in Leviathan, I'm not a Hobb scholar, but I've read Leviathan many times. And the structure of his argument is qualified, he's qualifiedly agreeing with the socratic and the Thomas view, absolute view that the character of political life needs to be defined by human nature, or at least by categorical reference to human nature, but he's got a completely different concept of what human nature entails and furthermore, the subject matters abrogated by the fact that we're talking about the political as a discrete sphere of human activity. You know, so you're essentially managing passions by appeal to reason, born of self interest, and an understanding that, you know, abiding these uh, strictures that facilitate peaceable living and the non-aggression pact between the individuals in the body politic, any given man, people of a reason can dominate that this is the best way to satisfy the demands of the passions, which are pre-rational in nature and which have a greater part in enemy, the human organism than any other factors. And as a consequence of that, we can also extrapolate what the essence is of sovereign authority, you know, if the if the if the political is the economy of violence and that's all it is, and if civic responsibility and the moral consensus within civil society is essentially an agreement of non-aggression and you know, what facilitates the realization of the passions which again are what animates man in pre-rational terms towards any political activity. The only thing facilitating that is his understanding that, you know, he'll be reasonably free of the fear of him and in death. So The sovereign at the end of the day is he who decides who lives and dies and if you transgress against his sovereign will you will die and We're gonna get more into the concept of Leviathan itself or himself because the Hobbes Understanding the state apparatus and sovereignty as concentrated like literally in a man or in a person he believes this is fundamental But we're not there yet but you know and he'll he gets into the The cycle the symbolic psychological aspect of how man structures His concept of authority and why this polls like a certain fascination over the human psychology but at the same time You know this isn't really that important because the fact of the sovereign's ability to Deliver death to the individual at any time Any universal capacity that's another thing too like before Leviathan like all are equal Because nobody can fight Leviathan Leviathan can kill any man. So when you're a king or if you're a beggar it doesn't matter You're like equally vulnerable before Leviathan so You know even somebody you Even somebody hated the government Or who had contempt for the concept of the divine rate of kings or Who rejected outright the concept of Authority over him his body in mind because he was some sort of anarchist or something It doesn't matter because he understands that he will die if he doesn't abide the sovereign will of Iathen so you know again praxis is and it's harmonious Compliment to theory is what matters and how to go further in positive to like how could we even know like white people are abiding what Leviathan Represents like even if they say that they believe in you know the king or they believe in king and country or they believe the emperor is like a Divine instantation of Sun marvelous idea. How would you know if they really think that? You know who'd just say that's not just some artifact of You know the pre rational mind you know and in the way it it develops. It's kind of a conceptual syntax so to speak you know So that's important to when people you know again, I Obviously anybody who Follows what I write and say you should realize I basically reject the Abusing paradigm it outright you know but It's um But there's an internal logic to it that's very developed. It's not just nonsense and It's also not it's the base to something like Bentham I think and this is a so different discussion kind of reduced demand Almost like a bovine You know Tell loose man was like a talking animal or something but you know We're talking about a very we're talking about a very narrow although fundamentally Important I mean due to it's It's this so it's somebody matters life and death You know But it's we're talking about like one kind of narrow domain of human activity You know like Hobbes business isn't there wasn't to you know describe like the human condition and absolute terms are you know Describe what positive it's like a good life or something like that so that's um Something to let's it stay people is kind of our punitive on attacks on on it Now the rebuttal obviously even from people who again abide The kind of Francis Bacon view Which in a lot of ways is sympathetic to what I just Positive you know, they there were there were but all the Hobbes from kind of all quarters or the attempt to rebuttal is You know well, okay fine, you know if there was no Even if you accept that there was no kind of like first society and you know like man is born to the state of nature Like what he said he's being positive here that there was some just like global state of savagery Hobbes actually wrote specifically on this and it's a patient of those the terms that were a bottle and what he said was really interesting Hobbes didn't have a clear he never he does not saying that there was ever a state of nature all over the world You know he's saying that at different times in different places You know and any given epoch obviously you know, there's ordered societies and There's what we could that or there's a raindrops that says all the criteria of Political order but you know, there's there's just as many other places You know that exists you know in conditions of splendid anarchy in the war of all the install and the example he involved was the America the day You know 16th century 16th and 17th century America Was like was this you know and Hobbes said that the Americas in his era You know Was a react by civil wars independent sovereigns all like declaring dominion over you know various swaths of territory and And trade routes and you know some of these were some of these people were white men, you know some of them were Some of them were were American Indians Who presided in a lot of cases over surprisingly Large amount of what we consider capital and territory You know so his so Hobbes example is basically like well look at the Americas You know like you want an example of the state of nature and the war of all install juxtaposed against you know sovereign political Societies like there you go and this is what we used to be and You know that's that's fairly persuasive you know the problem as I said is what The problems that it becomes taught a lot of all I mean that's a problem with the enlightenment perspective across the board Is that you know if it's like okay, so if you're gonna if you're gonna reduce human behavior to individual atomized integers rendering discrete decisions based on Some kind of biologically in most cases quantifiable impulse You know Then it's like oh well then then the first society must have just you know I've been this kind of state of individuals Weeding war on each other and it's all you know, and it's not that's not the way humans work You know you're not born as this individual Like doesn't have parentage and doesn't live in a community and doesn't speak a certain language and doesn't isn't surrounded by Symbols that are resonant in discrete cultural psychology that are probably heritable You know and beyond that the whole kind of equality of violence There are some men were fit for command and some who are not Like my example is Democratic Kempichia. Like you know the community. We did they killed a third of the population They killed everybody Who was master caste as they viewed it? Well, okay, where what did that what happened then? Did it that does that mean that the community are rude is now like the permanent garment and Cambodia like no apparently four years later they They were dust You know and it's not That's kind of a logic of the prison yard or something like but even there. It's like it's not People who just like follow around the guy who's like the most violent man who has the most weapons or something like it's not how these work You know you follow We're often than not you know and people follow um You know um People are hardwired to follow The man who constitute the this kind of archetype in their mind that you know is Comports with some sort of idealized model But beyond that there's just natural human tendencies towards obedience You know Most people aren't capable of discrete action unto itself NICE! related to command from originating from a source that he was authoritative. And anybody who doesn't recognize that doesn't really know about man. And I suppose the counter-rebuttal to that is that, well, people are just educated from birth and conditioned towards these things. I mean, okay, but that doesn't explain the perennial existence of caste paradigms. It's a dozens. You know, and like I said, there's not that the 20th century is a living laboratory of flavorables where people rose up and slaughtered the ruling caste. And these experiments were disastrous. You know, it's got a 100% failure rate. So apparently that's not the way things are ontologically. I realize we're only going to like 50 minutes, but I don't want to, I want to dive into Leviathan, like the concept of Leviathan. And then we'll have to, I don't want to go for just like 10 minutes on that. So we got to wait until next time. I'm sorry for that. Let me ask a question then. Yeah, of course. If we saw in the 20th century a slaughtering of the master class, a caste, especially in the beginning of the century, is that why they had to switch over to the intense social engineering so that they at least had, you know, this, this quote unquote, upper caste, but really a slave caste that could actually keep the, keep the engines running and keep the machines moving. It's both. They had to, it's complicated in the case of revolutionary communism for a couple of reasons because you've got to eradicate competing modalities, psychological modalities. And the only way you can do that, you've got to, you've got to kill the host literally of those concepts. You know, one of the reasons why invoked a career, Rouge a lot is not just because I'm, I don't think I'm a cop person. At least I hope not. I don't just have a discrete fascination with the extreme violence of their, of their system. But Paul Pot, you know, aka Celeth Sartre, he was actually a very learning guy, unlike somebody like Mao, who was an idiot. They took to its logical extreme, you know, the understanding of revolutionary praxis as the only way to realize true communism is you've got to eradicate all potential competitor modalities. Because that's the only way it can flourish because you've got to eradicate the understanding of value as money. You've got to eradicate the concept itself of private property. You can't just re-condition people, you know, by reeducation or something or by forcing them to, you know, repeat back ideological strictures, you know, the kind that would pop up in a propaganda pamphlet. You've got to render it literally impossible to divide psychologically a competing system or a preceding system. You know, so that's part of the social engineering. But part of it also was the idea was even among people who weren't, you know, like true believe in communists. Like the idea was that the machine age and the scientific age, you know, and especially, you know, into the atomic age, it's like, well, you know, the master element society exists is technicians. And it's men who can wield and understand technology. In order to prevent the kind of previous tasks paradigm from snapping back into some kind of reactionary form is we've got to disseminate knowledge in these technological processes and the science that underlies them is like, why is possible and take like people from diverse, actually diverse, not diverse as a regime was word from diverse places and situations, you know, and make them covenant in these processes and sciences, you know, and then install them like in these key like powerful roles. You know, and that will they'll prevent, you know, some sort of like new aristocracy from awesome fun. Of course, all that happened was like that non-inclatch or it became like a dictatorship of like the military bureaucrat, you know, that's like what so be does it is. This is like the dictatorship of the ZAR and and these like landed aristocrats, you give like a dictatorship of the guy who runs like, you know, the McCoy and British design bureau or like the guy who's, you know, some senior man in supreme Soviet to, you know, you've got to like report to with your numbers for like the green production according to like the yearly plan or whatever. You know, like how people realize very quickly it's not somehow like superior and the real is among them. Realized like this is just reality is those of this other thing is a, there's other things aheadless of I think that's part of why Hobbes is the count of what sovereignty is is important. Despite his blind spots that we just kind of like explicated here if that makes any sense. Well, in the Soviet case, you know, Marx argued that you needed capitalism to keep going because not only was it going to give you the means of production that they were going to see so that they could keep so that. They could eventually take it over, but also it would de-rassinate people from their capitalism would de-rassate people from their heritage from their history. And it seems like in the case of, and Stalin even knew that he wrote that, but in the case of the Soviet Union, it seems like it turned more into. Partly revenge upon the orthodox revenge upon the, the Tsar and they didn't take it to that logical conclusion because I mean let's face it at that point Russia was not as. Industrialized as, you know, say the United States was. Well, no, there was no, in 1918, in 1917, 1918, there was no industrial proletariat in Russia. I mean, such that there was in Moscow, it was like a tiny percentage of the body politic. No, the Soviet communism is weird. The way it developed is weird. You know, and the fact that it happened there is weird. You know, I mean the Soviet Union was an incredibly strange society. You know, but at the same time it made sense. You know, and it is a subject from another podcast, but as I'm always coming back to. I, they don't realize the power and the power of potential of the Soviet Union as it existed. They also forget that the Soviet Union, at its Z, are you will Zenith, you know, like the Brezhnev era when they accomplished the Degenerity. The Soviet Union was like a crippled beast because the Third Reich had devastated it and they never really recovered. You know, without the Third Reich, the Soviet Union dominates this planet. And America is this kind of garrison state that, you know, still has like the bounty of a continent full of, you know, probably like half the planet from any natural resources. But it's basically besieged by this kind of like world communist Leviathan of, you know, that's over on Europe and, you know, devastated any resistance, be it in like Japan or the Islamic world or Africa or anywhere else. So Mary's basic is an island and it's like a hostile like colored world of the communist Leviathan. I mean, that's, people like born after, you know, the 1980s, like, or the 1970s, really, they go, they don't understand that or they might intellectually, but they don't really understand it. You know, yeah, it's a fascinating subject matter. All right, plugs, we'll get out of here. Yeah, like I was shouting out the last few days. I'm kind of in the presence of restructuring my online presence and my content. And I'll begin that in earnest when I get back from O.G.C. the week of the 18th, I guess. But my line home is sub stack. We recently got kicked off at discord, which I that did not surprise me, but I'm seeking out a new like online home for our chat server. And when I get home from the O.G.C. Conlave, I will do that. I will do all this stuff. I haven't forgotten. But my online home or all kinds of good stuff is this sub stack. It's real time is 7777 that's sub stack that time. I'm going to act in a lot of places, but go there. there and you know, you can find where I'm at. I know other platforms and as I kind of restructure my online presence. So, you know, I'll have more to tell people this regard, but for now, go to the subject. Awesome. Thank you. Until the next episode. I want to welcome everyone back to the Pikenyone show, continuing the continental philosophy series, Thomas 777 is with us. Are you doing it? It's on us. I know I'm pretty well. I know, like I said, last episode that probably seems to be killing the focus as much on Hobbes and the continental philosophy discussion, but it's essential and Hobbes and Machiavelli are the key thinkers of modern political theory in terms of its origins. I mean, obviously, a privileged hagel is the most important political theorist or a lived, but the transition from the classical view of the political to the modern, you've got to understand Hobbes and Machiavelli. And continental theorists, particularly those from a juristic or mathematical school, which again, all things encompassing theoretical mathematics were referred to as geometry in the early modern era. All those thinkers were in dialogue with Hobbes and Hobbes credited himself as the discoverer of the science of politics, whether you accept the existence of such a thing or not, Hobbes considered himself to be the founder or discoverer rather of that paradigm. And basically, everyone subsequent who accepts that postulate views in that way too. It's not accidental that he called his book Leviathan. What Leviathan is as significant to the symbolic psychological aspect of what he was talking about. And basic capacities. If you're a Protestant, you mostly know Leviathan from the book of Job. Leviathan features in the Psalms in the book of Job in Isaiah. And in a lot of the apocrypha, Leviathan is in the book of Enoch, you know, "Cathletes and Orthodox." I believe, I believe Leviathan is depicted within a lot of his medieval artwork and subsequent as the sin of envy. Okay. That's not, that's not really what it represents in Scripture. Significantly, the Ophites, I'm sure I'm putting that pronunciation in it. They were a not-except in Rome in the third and fourth centuries, they were a veered serpence and totemic capacities. A lot of this stuff, including in the Conan movie, where people are worshipping set, you know, the Egyptian deity. I think sets Lord of the dead or something, okay? But anyway, these sorts of sinister pagans or depicted as worshipping snakes, well, that was the Ophites. That's where that comes from. Okay. Specifically, they believe that the serpent in the Garden of Eden in Genesis was like an instantation of wisdom and sacred knowledge. And they also revered Leviathan. One who was far as I say they worship Leviathan. Leviathan was the embodiment of the world's soul that incasculated all living things in animate mare. And it was depicted almost like the Viking world serpent. Leviathan spans and surrounds the earth like an equator. And, you know, presumably, he straddles, you know, the, the Carporeal realm, as well as whatever is beyond, you know, narcissism is essentially neopletons, okay? But in the Bible, the most that's written about Leviathan is Job 41. And Hobbes specifically was referring to the Job 41.34, which says he, he meaning Leviathan, he beholdeth all high things. He is king, he is a king over all the children of pride. So in other words, Leviathan is this terrible monstrosity and it's so powerful it can crush pride out of men, like all kneel before it. You know, no matter how pridefully are, or how much humorous is possessed them. Okay. Well, Leviathan is literally in physical terms. It's a giant sea monster. It's a sea serpent. It's Lord of the sea. And when God created the cosmos and the earth in the sea, there was all these primordial demons that ruled the earth. Leviathan ruled the sea. And there's none more powerful at sea. The hemat was the beast of the land. He's depicted either as an elephant, the hemat is of this kind of chimera, a monster. And Ziz is Lord of the air. Ziz of the giant terror bird, kind of like a crossman of Griffin and a terror deck. Okay. So these in early as creation, these monstrous, massively powerful chaotic, almost like crafty creatures. They ruled over certain aspects of creation. But then they were ultimately subjugated by God and almost, and like literally made the heel. And they returned into kind of almost pets. But this makes sense that an Englishman would, would would view the absolute sovereign, the most great and terrible thing as Leviathan, because obviously the sea and castle aiths great Britain, you know, and it's the source of its power, you know, even back then. And something that was going to subjugate and crush, even the mightiest warlords and would be sovereigns. And so if I'm anointed Messiah's, it very much tracks what kind of psychology of the people, negative to pertain to that, it would be the sea monster. You know, but that's, but the key, the key to it is what I said. It's Joe of 4134. Like Leviathan looks upon all the highest things. And he is a king over all in his domain. You know, he can only be subjugated by God. And he's so powerful and terrifying, he can crush pride out of all men who aspire to power and greatness. Now, this seems that there's an over emphasis on fear emanating from the essence of the sovereign. It's not an accident. Because that's the essence of sovereignty. It's not just mortal decision is a man, the power to, you know, determine matters of life and death over those subjugated and the body politic, but fear is the mechanism of sovereignty that facilitates political order within this mathematical paradigm, or geometric paradigm rather. You know, Hobbes's view of virtue is pragmatic. The entire book Leviathan is in dialogue, is in punitive dialogue with Aristotle and the Aristotelian concept of virtue. To Hobbes virtue was in the past in most political writing. And especially that, which was written for the benefit of, of princes and nobles, it was basically a rationalization for how powerful people are able to exploit and vent their own strength to enrich themselves and create value. And Hobbes was saying that there's necessarily a bad thing. But to pretend that there's this kind of metaphysical value to it beyond that, which is pragmatic is misguided. Hobbes the clear that virtue is nothing more than to have it, of doing what tends towards one's own self preservation, but when it goes fundamental condition and essence, you know, part of what contributes to one's own self preservation, enrichment is do facilitate permitting others to do the same. You know, an acting like a brute ultimately is counterproductive and sabotages that self-interested enterprise. You know, so there is a balancing calculus here. Vice-contra this pragmatic orientation towards virtue is basically anything to the contrary that is offensive to order and that is self-sabotaging. And we'll get into this in a minute because first we've got to define more about the essence of sovereign authority. But this is why even from a pragmatic perspective, things like modern government or illegitimate, like sabotaging the fortunes of entire classes of people based on this like imaginary appeal to, you know, the dignity of some race or population, that's the definition of tyranny. It's also self-sabotaging of the enterprise of sovereignty, which only exists derivative that can send to the body politic. You know, so this was important because some people misread Hobbes and say that, well, you know, once Leviathan is anointed, it can do whatever it wants. That's not true. But moving one of the reasons why Hobbes is credited to is kind of the father of liberalism, capital of liberalism, even though in America people generally assign that significance to John Locke because the American system, as it existed, I mean, it hasn't existed for, you know, since 1865. Locke drew upon a lot of Hobbes' political ontology, but he frankly softened it, and also his view of the social contract at totally different parameters. But and also Locke wasn't nearly as hostile to the the current set of aristocracy. Let me tell you about the last episode. Hobbes rejected the Aristotelian postulate that, you know, some men are by nature, you know, more worthy to come in and others, you know, axiomatically worthy to serve. He rejected that based on the economy of violence, and that in the Hobbesian state of nature, which precedes political order, you know, and any man can murder an individual and command and seize that command for himself. You know, there's nothing in nature for cluting that, and beyond that, Hobbes makes the point that, in government, one must do everything in their power to prevent the emergence of pride within representatives of the sovereign. And in order to abide this, in order to abide this conceptual framework where this philosophical orientation where some men are the natural aristocracy that does nothing if not inculcate people with pride and an overweaning pride at that. And even if they believe themselves to be good men and even if by some measure they are, you know, what what derives from their decisionism is always going to be rationalized as, you know, deriving from some essential benevolence and, you know, contain within their essential nature as, you know, the natural elite. You know, and that's, I don't accept that argument, but it's persuasive and it's internally logical. And within the geometry of politics that Hobbes generally believes that he had discovered, that makes perfect sense. You know, and beyond that, Hobbes says, even if Aristotle's right, even if men are fundamentally unequal by nature, individual men, particularly those of great ambition, will always consider themselves equal, or at least on equal terms before the law, and certainly before God. So they'll be unwilling to make peace unless this is acknowledged, you know, beyond superficial terms. There's gotta be some basic equality of status that's structurally coded in to the sovereign mechanism as well as that's internalized by the individuals that constantly the body politic. And it can't just be a perfunctory thing that's acknowledged in passing or by storing language in some official document. It's gotta actually be believed and it's gotta be a core tonnit of how equity is realized. And procedural as well as substantive terms. So the sake of peace within the parameters of sovereign authority, this has to be acknowledged, even if it doesn't exist. So even though it's a fiction, it is a law of nature in the Hobbesian sense that all men must acknowledge each other as equal by nature, even if it is a fiction. You know, this renders natural differences within the body politic irrelevant. Okay, and again, we're talking about the domain of the political, which is a discrete sewer accumut activity. We're not talking about an absolute existential terms or something like that. And people misconstrued that as well. So the purpose of this geometry of politics, it's got a single purpose and invoking the laws of nature to rationalize, you know, the architecture of that purpose. All this tends to make men sociable and peaceable into a ballad should reduce to a minimum or as minimal as possible, friction, resentment, hostility, deriving from pride or partiality or discreet ambition or excessive self-love or exploitative covetessence. All of these, that that's the purpose of the entire science of politics is. And the the Hobbesian conceptual framework of nature, what they represent are guiding poll stars and rules and laws for unbiased arbitration and impartial distribution of goods and the creation of incentives to avoid in gratitude to becoming endemic within the body politic and to breed a basic absolute respect for the law. So when he's talking about nature and natural laws, he's not resorting to ethics. He's not talking about natural law arguments as we think of them in legal theory or that, you know, we think of in the terms that theologians and these liberal moralists like John Rawls talked about, he's talking about the basic architecture of the natural world and the as regards human affairs and the absence of a governing sovereign. He literally believed in self to be discovering identifiable and quantifiable geometric variables relating to power paradigms within the human social existence. Okay, so that's important. He's not passing a value judgment on it. Hobbes have learned in the Bible, you know, like any Englishman of his caste education would be and he wasn't believing Christian and Hobbes absolutely suggested, I don't want to do this later, I wanted to go into part three. He absolutely suggested that to purposefully and with malice of fourth thought make hash with these laws of nature, there there'll be a terrible punishment derived from God's architecture and in the case of a sovereign, you know, who ignores these things, you know, O'English's own hubris or only the fact he believes himself to be a God on earth. You know, he will probably be murdered in a rebellion if he's too much of a tyrant or if he merely grows him as an antages, his role as sovereign, obviously, you know, anything he accomplishes in legacy terms will be rapidly dismantled as whatever structures he erected, literally figurative, will be unable to serve their function of reducing friction within a body politic to minimal quantities, such that the regime that he serves in some cases created will exist in perpetuity. So that's key. And of course, the big critique from subsequent liberal schools of thought, as well as from classical oriented theorists and reactionaries, how can this geometry of politics be sustainable if there's no true moral framework and different senate, if there are just incentives? What kind of suits and virtue in political terms is, do not do one to others, you would not have them do one to you. So acting, violating natural laws of political geometry to enrich oneself at the expense of others, is barbarism under a mirror of some sort of abiding rationale, whether it's some contrivance of divine right, or claim that one is a natural lord and those that oppresses are natural slaves, or a man claiming that he's part of a minority race or sect, and that affords him special privileges and protections, capture the majoritarian ethnos, and it can be anything, but this is ultimately self-defeating. And we're seeing this right now in the American situation. I shouldn't need to paint a simple this picture of what I mean, the selves are smart, so I'm sure they discern that. And also too, the central defect of trying to extrapolate Christian ethics to politics is that the essential defect of saying that well, logos and higher reasons should, like a long, should rule politics, because you're presuming that every subject of the political sovereign is some sort of God-fearing actor, because the only thing that binds men in such conditions is their consciousness and the individual and the inner witness of the individual. And beyond that even, all men are sinners, so even men who fear God and even men who believe in the living Christ, the punishment they have to fear is that of their immortal soul and judgment before God. If there's an immediate hope of reward, they'll probably take their chances. Even men who are otherwise, basically decent people, this is what Hobbes called the fear of quote "invisible powers" that exists in the state of nature and as ubiquitous, if that's not powerful enough, the political is man's domain, not God's. You're ultimately accountable to God for everything you do, but God's not some arbiter of the political. What is needed is the establishment of conditions that reward people for obeying the natural law, the physical geometry and punish people horribly who don't. In short, the essence of sovereignty is of visible power, contrary to invisible powers. Security, first and foremost, within the body politic must be paramount. Some people suggested, particularly the 20th century, where I think even intelligent people with a long view of historical processes, they developed a skewed perspective owing the anomalous violence of it and interstate worrying, becoming normal, in fact, as totally abnormal. A lot of these people said, "Well, Hobbes are really concerned with the internal situation and the body politics ability to come to consensus that violence, because the 30 years war and the war of three kingdoms was set to tenor for this." His objectivity was compromised by the specter of murderous civil war, but that's the wrong way to look at it, because if you don't piece within the body politic is what makes all other security possible. That's what facilitates security and they both defend against enemies of alienage and foreign threats, like that the converse isn't the case. Hobbes is really the essence of a sovereign polity. The brass text of it is the ability to achieve consensus within a body politic that is ossified around a consensus that thus then precludes civil war. And men voluntarily take themselves out of the state of war of all against all in order to identify as a body politic whereby a moral consensus allows the selection of a sovereign who will then wield absolute power of life and death over every individual constituent element of the body politic. The issue isn't whether civil war is rare or common or that doesn't figure into the calculus. What it is is it's a prerequisite for the creation of sovereignty and its establishment and its functioning according to the parameters of the previously identified natural law. And this is why and this is important because it's another issue of first impression. A key to Hobbes is political ontology is that the sovereign must political union of the body politic, authority, conceptual and actual driving from sovereignty and the sovereign itself. This has to be concentrated within an actual person. Justice and injustice in political terms and what people owe to the sovereign and with the sovereign owns the body politic. This all rests upon to this day the abstraction of legal personhood but it's such a harshly and a habisian politics political theory is that this must be an actual person. And again that's an issue of first impression. There were great kings and Athens obviously like parakeles and stuff and Caesar was revered as it got on earth at zenith but this hadn't been proposed before. People didn't claim that the essence of sovereignty can only exist within the man of the king himself. And the reason why there's a pragmatic aspect obviously because it's comforting to people and it also allows them to orient themselves correctly if they can point to like a sovereign king or queen or emperor or a lord protector, you know, warlord like like Kramwell and say, you know, that man is the emperor, that man is the king or that man is the lord protector, you know, an embodied within him is the will of the body politic because your individual will is sacrificed to the sovereign and the interest of, you know, security being sustained internally in perpetuity as well as, you know, allowing justice and equity to be realized, you know, you give up your right to punish privately, you give up your right to make war, you know, and identify criteria for war and to identify, you know, who the, the ability to identify private rivals as public enemies, you sacrifice all that to the sovereign and, you know, the sovereign, his will becomes the collective will of the body politic, you know, and when he takes action either as warlord or as law giver, you know, that is where his power derives from, you know, this can't be vested in some abstract assembly, you know, or this can't be reduced to some sort of procedure, that can be executed by any like council of men or women or by some random guy, you know, that's, that's not how it works and that's on to lot and ontological knowledge, you know, as a consequence of that too, you know, the legislature, the judiciary and any other branch of government, sovereignty does not invest in those branches, so it'd be perverse for a president to claim or an emperor to claim that he's bound by the courts. Now, part of the essence of sovereignty, a sovereign can say, I'm going to forego wielding sovereign power over this court decision and allow a decision to stand, but this idea that he's not sovereign, you know, a court is or a legislature is, that's, that's logically perverse. And it flies in the face of the entire basis of of of sovereign authority, you know, both the theory of it and its praxis and this incidentally is one reason why America makes no sense post-watergate because basically it's being a wet, you know, and you can't declare that 300 million people decided that John Roberts or Elaine Kagan, you know, represents the body politic and is some sovereign authority, you know, like I'm being a big obtuse, but, you know, the point is valid, you know, and that's why it's not an accident and it's it's not some contrivance of, you know, horse trading or something at the original constitutional convention that the president of the state is the only nationally elected representative, you know, this is the lineage between from from a Hobbes to the founding of the United States is more proximate and in conceptual linear terms direct than people think, okay, um, and also what preceded Hobbes' identification of a geometry of politics was an understanding whether, again, whether I or any other man accepts this or not, was an understanding that was extant at the time of Leviathan being devised and written that there was a science of the law and, you know, a science of equity, you know, so Hobbes is defining the social contract in legal terms and the commonwealth was defined in terms of legal personhood and Hobbes takes it a step further and, you know, again, going to the fact that if there is in fact a political geometry that can be discovered the architecture of which is what facilitates, you know, the, the, the permanent piece of the body politic and the psychological acceptance, the sovereign authority, you know, according to the terms contained within an intrinsic to the laws of nature, you know, obviously this derives from the same basis as the science of the law and there's got to be not just a theoretical agreement, there's got to be actual practice there that comports, um, with both conceptual structures, you know, not just the appearance of harmony but for the actual harmonious exercise, um, or execution or rather of these things, um, you know, I want to say let me see what time we got. Okay, um, so the social contract is the basis of political order facilitated by sovereign authority, you know, which can only, which can only be derivative of, you know, a consensus among the body politic and the criteria for who and what causes the body politic is important to, especially in the present day, when this, um, these concepts are deliberately infuscated or simply just not defined other than the most abstract in terms, but we're probably to get to that next time. What the social contract has two components, according to Hobbes, what is it covenant? Each member of the body politic, the initial founding act of, you know, the, the creation of Leviathan is a covenant between each member of the body politic to acknowledge, you know, an intent to create a civil society, presided over by a man or a body of man as long as these people, you know, are discreetly identifiable in whom absolute sovereignty is to vest. Okay, and this is critical because this is a kind of ascending authority, you know, like a sovereign, him deciding, you know, what the criteria are, um, suicide, that, um, facilities of authority, that's, that's, that's, that's tyrannical, but it's also a logical fallacy. That's not how it works. You know, um, or a sovereign deciding that he wants the body politic to include more people than it does, you know, based on criteria that will not be accepted by the actual body politic. You know, again, that's, that's not just a tyrannical dictate, but it's also, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's also what odds, it frustrates the purpose of the entire procedure. And it contradicts the laws of nature that give rise to political authority in the first place. But moving on, the second component of the social contract is quite literally the vote determining who or what is to be the sovereign or talking about the vote in somewhat metaphorical terms, some act of decisionism, some formal act of decisionism that represents the covenant and the compact between each member of the body politic, with knowledge, the sovereign authority, the person of the sovereign. Now, how that person is chosen, you know, how that man is bested within authority, that can take, like what do process constitutes for those purposes can take a number of forms. It's not, it's not some hard and fast, um, paradigm. or set of criteria by which that has to be conducted, save, you know, again, that it reflects, you know, an extant and actual and verifiable covenant that is accepted by, you know, each party to that compact, what presumably would be, you know, like adult men of full majority, capable of bearing arms, but that we're going over ahead of ourselves. But, you know, and presuming a true consensus, you know, not just a raw majority of 51-49%, but presuming that there is an actual cohesiveness and this covenant is accepted, you know, by something more, I would think that a super majority would be the criteria by which legitimacy attaches, but the people who are outside of the covenant and who refuse to avail themselves to the contract, you know, people who are in open revolt against it, they remain in the state of war according to the laws of nature, and thus they become the enemies of the body politic, okay, and that's manageable, you know, the begs the question is the way what ratio constitutes a tipping point and do civil war, but that's somewhat total logical, you know, that consensus is kind of like what's in purposes of the social contract, it's probably kind of like what's the Supreme Court said about pornography, like you know it when you see it, you know, but this is why, you know, again, and we won't have time to get to this in this episode, but Hobbes very much believed that there had to be a basic homogeneity within the body politic, at least in terms of moral agreement, because you can't, you can't have a third of the body politic saying that they'll abide the covenant, but with these qualifications, you know, because, you know, and they'll reject certain affirmative criteria and grounds that, you know, they worship a different God, or that, you know, they don't accept certain parameters that the majority does of what is, you know, probably within the scope of sovereign authority, you know, based on a sectarian objection, you know, and that's why Hobbes goes out of his way in Leviathan to make clear that the sovereign has the authority to ban or censor, you know, matters of religious belief, you know, not because he's the pope or not because, you know, he has any legitimate authority to regulate men's inner witness and their consciences, but if people arrive or if people take on, you know, a sectarian belief structure, contra the majority, you know, that you're sewing the seeds of civil war, and you're allowing yourself as part of the minority faction, a sort of repudiation device whereby you can return to the state of war if it suits you, based on appeal to a theological preference, you know, and that, that puts the a private right of war into the hands of a minority element of the body politic, and again, a sovereign can't surrender his sovereignty, that's, that's, you know, a self-refuting poshulate, you know, and it contradicts the essential nature of what we're talking about, but, um, you know, and there's no suggesting that the essence of sovereignty is fear and the ability to to kill, that makes people queasy, and the lower case liberal objection to that is that, well, you know, the dignity of the individual, and the dignity of the group that individual belongs to, must be honored, and compliance can't be based on fear, but all compliance is based on fear, like again, men are sinners and avarices the norm, you can't rely upon invisible power and men's inner witness to make them abide political authority, that's preposterous. We're not talking about Hobbes and not talking about rather what is actually virtuous, and what is aspirational. He's saying that, "coated into nature, there are literally natural laws of power, politics, the political, is it a discrete sphere of human activity, the subject matter of which is violence and power to ride from violence and the threat of violence, and according to this geometry, this literal geometry, the only way that a sovereign can perpetuate itself or himself, because it's literally a person we're talking about, is by resort to the power of life and death, and inculcating members of the body politic, who despite their initial consent, or that of their sires, which they inherited, and moral as well as ontological terms, the only thing that truly prevents them from resorting to acts derived from destructive ambition is the fact that they will be murdered if they rise up against the sovereign. There's not to say that there are no remedies before the government, or that a sovereign cannot lose his mandate, but he cannot lose it when acting lawfully, and within the scope of his authority, some cadre of men simply decide that they don't want to obey his dictates anymore, or that they want to seize power for themselves based on a sectarian, imperative, or an ideological rationale, and people confuse those things, especially because one of the reasons why the conceptual syntax of political theory in the 20th century, and were very much mired in that paradigm conceptually, why there is no point in this, because it exclusively derives from moralizing language, even that which is nominally atheist or for it to be a science, it's just endless moral postulating, and there's something rather profound there. Part of it is just the vulgarization of discourse and things, obviously, and the breakdown of the majority in consensus, so said all discursive language aims to agitate certain segments of the body politic, and to exploit these sorts of divisions. It's all those things, but it's more than that. One of the reasons why the return of general religiosity is a corrective is because a lot of I just described, I believe it's born of a moral impoverishment from religious quarters, where moral education should be emanating out. Obviously, in any absence of that, honestly or not, the people of the public authority as a source of those things or what should be. Proverbs that may be as sort of in any port and a storm sort of thing. But yeah, next time we'll get into Hobbes's view of Christ and things. But, you know, and that's, so to be clear, there are remedies held not by the body politic as a collective, but individuals constituent there and to be clear, Hobbes viewed, according to the natural law, the body politic to be discrete individuals contracting with one another. This isn't over so sort of notion of, you know, some sort of psychological or metaphysical whole, that, you know, possessive collective will. This is important, okay? And this is one of the things that defines the angle, sex and tradition, contrary to that of the continent, that be clear. Hobbes absolutely believed in precise remedies, contra sovereign authority. You know, but he viewed these things as one would a controversy in mathematics or in science. You know, so the emergence of political hostility at scale, it had to be resolved through resort to precise variables deduced from the social contract, the law, which itself is derived from natural laws, you know, in the rights and duties of the sovereign and his obligation to those subjugated. And, you know, in kind, the rights, duties, and obligations of the subjects to the sovereign, you know, and to one another. So this idea that, well, revolution just happens. You know, or there's a lifespan of every government and, you know, we've, we've got to just accept that, civil war, like all war arrives like the seasons. Hobbes rejected that outright. You know, he, he, he, he positive that it was, it would be tantamount to stating that there, there's an equation that simply can't be answered. You know, where there's some, or an engineering of bridge, there's, there's just no way to, you know, devise a proper load bearing beam. You know, and again, I don't accept that. Ontology, but it's internally consistent. And I mean, wrong. And Hobbes is one of the most disciplined and methodical, political theorists who ever lived. Like, he absolutely, this was, this truly was like a complete conceptual structure, you know, like from inception. But even if it wasn't, you know, the internal consistency has to be sustained before it's a whole letting merit, you know, so, even if you reject the stops and so these poshilits, there's really no other criteria that could sustain the, the paradigm, you know, other than this kind of mathematical model, that almost, that almost parallels Newtonian physics, if that makes any sense. But I'm, I'm gonna end it here in sort of about 55 minutes and I'm gonna change gears a bit. I hope this isn't going on too long. Again, I, I'd want to discuss Anglophonic philosophy and Anglopholosophy series, but as you move on, like you'll see why I did this. And I didn't want to start talking about, I don't want to start talking like Kant or Schmidt and make reference to Hobbes and then I have to, you know, kind of drop a capsule summary of these three concepts and things. But I hope people are getting something valuable out of this. From the feedback we got at O.G.C. told me that they were because they got a lot of props and they make me very happy. - Well, anyone who's wondering why you would cover Hobbes, Paul Gottfried's book, it's his textbook. I think he taught, taught college course with it on Schmidt is basically all about Hobbes. - Yeah, no, I got, Fringe's a great, a great guy. A great thinker like he's, I, I, I, I really get a lot out of his, out of his scholarship. Yeah, no, it's a good point, man. I should think that book out and like, "Refresh America" like, "I read it years ago" and it's, it was awesome. I read it after "Wimbrillism" lately, which is, I mean, all, all Godfrich stuff is compelling. But yeah, I, thanks for reminding me of other Schmidt book. Oh, I'll dig it up. - Well, mutual friend of ours talked to Paul Gottfried on Monday and told him that there was a whole bunch of young kids running around who were reading, you know, reading him and his, his comment was, "I'm glad that my friends are getting younger and my enemies are getting older." - Yeah, there's so, yeah, yeah. No, I sympathize. I mean, Gottfried really is old. He's like 83. He's 83. - Yeah, and he's still going, which is great. But no, I, even in my own life, I see that axiom kind of coming to fruition. And yeah, I take some pride in it. - Awesome. - Yeah, yeah. Just plug your, plug your sub stack and anything else and we'll get out here. - Yeah, my online home is sub-stack. It's real Thomas777.substack.com. That's like, "Roll the Magic Happens" and all the felonies happen. But I'm a, I started out earlier today. I need a few days to recover from the road and stuff, but pursuant to me, like, restructuring my brand and content and I was getting new from Discord. I, I decided to rumble, it's gonna be our home for our weekly livestream. This Saturday, I got a bunch of stuff to do and I got a couple social engagements. I mean, relating to partisan stuff, you know, just like friends of ours. I, I got to connect with. But a week from Saturday, we'll start the stream. Again, the weekly stream, it'll be on a rumble. Like, don't worry, I'm gonna, like, pin the link where everybody can find it on the sub stack and stuff and you'll be able to find other social media platforms through sub-stack and I'm restructuring and rebuilding my website in coming weeks. So, yeah, for now, get up sub-stack. I'm also on T-gram and Instagram. I'm kinda ubiquitous. I'm on YouTube, but like, see, can you still find, but yeah, for now, find me on sub-stack and we'll go from there, it's kinda things grow and develop. - We were doing a stream recording last night about the OGC and the event and just doing a recap of the speeches and one of the things, Bagbee speech came up and one of the things that I said was, I said, go subscribe to Thomas' sub-stack, the talks that he's having with Bagbee in this season of Mind Faser, you are going to want to hear. - That's great, thank you, man. - Yeah, and I am-- - Yeah, maybe an intro percent. - Yeah, one, I'm not, you know, you're my friend. I'm not doing this because you're my friend. I'm doing this because you people want to hear the conversation that's happening. - Yeah, thank you, man. Yeah, Bagbee's a dear friend and yeah, he's a brilliant guy, man. I mean, I'm really blessed. I mean, I'm always blessed that you and Jay Burton want to collab with me because you guys always bring a lot of fire. But Bagbee and Josh Neal, like both of them guys are super intelligent and I think we have a good rapport. Like I do and they do. Our subject, maybe our concentrations are different but they dovetail. And yeah, I, I owe both of those guys a tremendous debt, man. John Slater too, he wrote a great book. Yeah, I mean, he's a great dude too, but he's, he's every bit as intelligent as these other guys. But I'm very much a, I'm very much a, like a theoretical guy and I, and Bagbee and Josh Neal, really kind of compliment my subject, never concentrations. So yeah, no, that's tremendous, man. Thank you for that endorsement. - Bye, bye. this weekend's busy but we can reconvene anytime next week. we can continue this series. - We will. Thank you, Thomas. Appreciate it. - Yeah, man. Likewise. - I want to welcome everyone back to the Picananos show. Thomas is back and he is going to continue talking about continental philosophy. Where are we going today, Thomas? - I was gonna say we had a discussion on Machiavelli. It really for the last, really like since the Eisenhower era. I don't know what it's like now when it speculates the same, but basically in the 1950s, from the post war era when the university curriculum was sort of reestablished and reconfigured until the 1990s. If you studied political theory or western philosophy that had an, like at undergraduate level, for example, they had a component of political theory. You, the curriculum would teach Hobbes, Spinoza and Machiavelli basically has one subject matter. Now, Hobbes and Spinoza succeeded Machiavelli. Hobbes literally born right about a generation subsequent. But the reason why that's done, it's an over simplification, but I get it, the internal logic of it, Machiavelli and Hobbes are considered to be the fathers of modern political science. And, like I said, people like Muresh and I'm are considered to be only going to be midwit. I mean, he's preferable to the abject morons and credence. Who generally populate the academy and and the permanent state, but he's, he's, he's got a real grasp of political philosophy, but people like him, they claim that Machiavelli is the father of political realism, which doesn't really make any sense. But what is true is that Machiavelli was very much in dialogue with the Nika Machian ethics and arguably an oppressive way. But that's the whole point is that Machiavelli was arguing as an Italian Catholic and like all Italians and really all Roman Catholics. There's this, there's this tension between Athens and Jerusalem, it's full of sociological poll stars. You know, a Christ empirically's, if you will, there's different than the enterprise that Hobbes took on. That's not what Hobbes was doing. Hobbes literally thought that he was creating a science of the political, you know, and he wasn't, he wasn't trying to reconcile that which is holy, literally. With, you know, that which is pragmatic and necessary. According to the demands of power, you know, in the discrete domain of political activity. It's like a difference between, it's like trying to compare earns and old to to say like closets because no two is a guy who wrote about the epistemological and phenomenological process of war and peace and how already merges. Whereas a cloud was writing about like how war is waged and how you accomplish victory conditions within the domain of political realities. Or it's like comparing a book on physics to like a manual and how you build a bridge. You know, so I think it's misguided that these things are lumped together at the same time. It does big a question as to whether Hobbes and Spinoff said red Machiavelli. In my opinion, for reasons that are outside the scope right now, but I'll get into a key want me to later. I think Spinoff said probably did. I don't think Hobbes did because it wouldn't have interested them. You know, other than maybe it's like, oh, well, that's what these, that's what these Latins are doing in this little warring states. Confluent that seems to never end. You know, but there's also to. There's also represented by the Hobbes and Machiavelli to, you know, when did the modern state emerge? Was it Kromel's, was it was it Kromel's protectorate? You know, they're a public he created literally after killing a king. Or was the third man and Isabella Spain, like the first was failure in state as we would think of it. This is an interesting question. And I don't have an answer to that. It depends on what your criteria are. It depends on what. Consolation of historical factors you privilege. But that's that's why it's important to the kind of discuss. Machiavelli and Hobbes and also Spinoza, but so it, you know, not I don't place the same after this on Spinoza. Not he's not important, but I'll get into why when we reconvene the next episode and explicate my reason, but that's why I'm treating them kind of as a singular subject episode as it were. And that's also why, like I think I alluded to the other week, you know, in a series on kind of laws. If you know why am I talking about English mathematicians, turned political theorists? Well, because from that point forward, basically, every man who wrote about the politics was, you know, I was in dialogue with Aristotle, but also with Hobbes. Okay. And you know, for clarity, it's not so much of Machiavelli wrote in the prints that's so important. It's what the impetus was for him writing it. I think is what's significant. And there's a certain naivety, I think, to a lot of academic types, as well as people who should know better, people who are insinuated into power, political roles. You know, this idea that in Clasmolensiquity, you know, a prince or a king or a world lord, he had, you know, he was exclusively committed to these kinds of highfalutin ideas of like an elevated morality and discerning what, you know, magnanimous virtue is and he would recoil at the idea of, you know, a kind of cold-hearted realism and how to apply power. Like that's preposterous, this ridiculous, you know, and Athens especially, but all the Peloponnesian cultures within that, Naloo, they were very aesthetically oriented. There was things you didn't talk about, like a pure and says maddered. You know, the fact that, the fact that, um, the generals and princes and nobles didn't air out the kind of nasty aspects of war and peace and the kind of dirty business of palace intrigues, even among their peers, that doesn't mean anything. Other than the fact that, you know, they were highly dignified people who were kind of a set by the uglier aspects of life. You know, I mean, I, that's, there's a literalism to academia and particularly in social sciences that's quite literally retarded. That don't mean that like colloquially. I mean, it's like a stunted way of approaching the human condition, and especially in, um, when dealing with the matters that are impacted by discrete cultural conventions, but, um, the, the key distinction, you know, I got said, the mafia of Ellie's indirect dialogue with the Nika Machia ethics or as you'll run across to especially a lot of stuff from the first half of the 20th century. It's just for first the Aristotle's ethics as this thing goes from the politics. They're talking about the Nika Machia and other things, okay? The subject matter of the Nika Machia ethics was virtue. And everything in the Aristotelian paradigm, and this isn't unique to Aristotle, this was the classical mind. There was an integral quality to knowledge. It wasn't bifurcated by the subject area, and there wasn't an understanding of well discrete domains of human activity. The call for any equivalent discrete moral convention that governs action within these spheres. To the Aristotle virtue is the governing pulsar of any human activity. It's also the tillos of political life and action. It's critical to define what virtue is and what can be understood to be its zenith or its most complete manifestation. The big criticism of the Socrates by his enemies and by Aristotelians, you know, axiomatically, is that Socrates spent a tremendous amount of time in his discursive dialogues attempting to define and unpack and identify the constituent elements of what is virtue. And in some basic way, the entire Socratic Enterprise was, you know, defining what exactly virtue is and the whole fourth on the concept of it, then to clarify it. And there's a subtext that any true set is factory resolution in this regard will never be arrived at, you know, which is high sophistry and that's incredibly subversive within the cultural paradigm I'm talking about. Like in contrast, Aristotle very much clarified these things in absolute terms, which had been the sort of cultural core of Athens that had zenith. This made the fact that, you know, Aristotle was a contemporary of Alexander, you know, like he taught him. Okay, at the Athens was still enjoyed tremendous cultural cache, but there were a civilization profound decline by the time. But that's often the case that kind of in the twilight of, or at least that, you know, post zenith, a cultural formal producer of its strongest thinkers because they have at least on matters of things like ethics and aesthetical subjects because they're far enough removed from the zenith of cultural production as it were that, you know, they have a kind of detached perspective. We'll still very much insinuated into a culture that although in precipice decline is very much like a living form of life. The Nikomagin ethics, it's totally unambiguous in its definition of virtue. Aristotle defined what he called the crowning virtue as "magnanimity". Magnanimity is the quality of being great in mind and in heart, which in turn makes possible the elevation of all other like subjugated virtues, you know. It's a code of honor. It's an intellectual orientation and it's an aesthetical commitment. It's kind of like the adored layer of, you know, a rigid intellectual discipline overlaying it. It's an impertinology but I'm trying to convey this in a way that people will find insolidable. But it's also, it is literally pagan. You know, it does not call for men to be humble. It'll embrace humility. The magnet, the magnetism is man, he's never self-deprecating, he's never a humble but he's also not arrogant because he has the correct understanding of his own abilities. He's never tried to inflate those abilities for clout or to capture power he doesn't deserve but he never tries to diminish himself and the eyes of others to make people, you know, find them reproachable or anything or abide some sort of, you know, egalitarian convention because this didn't exist in in classical antiquity as a concept. Magnumity, men who possess it, they're going to be singularly oriented towards seeking greatness and great things. The way to understand is we're considered to be like living historically. Okay. You know, it's a psychological orientation that adorns all other virtues and traits a character. It's not so much a discreet virtue into itself as it is, you know, a way of being. And you know, a magnanimous man, again, he's not going to forego, for example, he's not going to forego material wealth or an interest in women or, you know, he's not going to live as some kind of hair shirt or live like John the Baptist or something, but he's not going to place under value on these things, you know, and Aristotle is very clear, like men who try and capture wealth because they want the trappings of magnanimity, they don't possess it because a man so constituted doesn't care about that kind of thing. You know, I'd say paracles is probably the best example from within a cultural milieu from which Aristotle was speaking. You know, and it's again, the Aristotelian model of human psychology and kind of human essence is a highly integral. So the understanding is that, you know, there's not discreet geniuses in different fields, you know, there's men who are oriented towards greatness and have the capability to achieve it. And they've got the psychological foresight and their car to well enough with their own mortality to pursue these things in a complete capacity. You know, I think of Napoleon. uh, Muhammad, Pramwell, Edoth Hitler, okay? Um, but I don't think like an ancient person. You know, if I were transported back to the kind of reason there was style, he would probably say that a man like me is far too mired in the business of like high politics, you know, um, at, at the expense of other things, which is probably true. But one of, uh, one of the objections I had to the people who trying to die off the kind of pagan mindset, like I don't mean, I don't mean goofballs who, you know, takes trips to stone hands and like run around naked on the solstice or something. I mean, I mean, people are going to be in a lot of things. You can take on some sort of mindset, classical, and say, what do you, you can't do that? It's not only the work. You know, and I, you can kind of create an intellectual pastiche of the way people thought within that cultural framework, but you can't really immerse yourself in it. It's not possible. I think what's interesting about that is, is that a lot of the people who are doing that consider their ops to be Zionists. And that's exactly what Zionists do. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. And they're, it's the thing is make-believe identity of, uh, derailleur and people who are like race, idolaters and one of the other things. Um, yeah, it doesn't make any sense. Um, well, it's also, I mean, we're beginning a lot of time. It's like, well, I don't understand why they care about Zionism. It's like, well, if you, if you reject the logos and you want to pretend to be some pagan, like, why do you care about, why do you care about Zionists? You know, like you shouldn't, like you, like your view is that, um, there's this kind of binary, um, and primitive tribalism that if dressed up with adequate, aesthetical intellectual foundations, is, you know, represents truth. So, you know, you shouldn't care that, you shouldn't care that, you know, people who reject logos and, you know, the think that they're above God, like you shouldn't care about what they think, or you shouldn't care that they oppress you or other people. You know, um, well, yeah, no, that's, um, that's something worthy of the dedicated discussion. But, um, the, uh, there's a, um, I mean, no mistake. I mean, there are, this isn't, if people misunderstand, this was really imperative. I'm kind of the same way they misunderstand and the Chien's post-pression ethical orientation. Like, Aristotle makes the point again and again, and then I'm talking about it's that, you know, for example, like about what's morally upright in conventional terms. You know, young, young people should develop a sense of shame because, or their immaturity, for example, like they can't help making mistakes. So, you know, like a, like a very young man with the potential for, to be magnanimous. If he went around, declaring that he was never wrong and he simply knew better, I mean, that'd make him a fool. You know, and that would preclude the achievement of greatness in his moral life, okay? But this is the distinguishable from, um, you know, a belief that that which is wholly, must always super seed, worldly ambitions and greatness. You know, the, um, the Leostras and Joseph Croft's he book, I'm political philosophy, you know, Leostras is a problematic theorist, but he did produce some great scholarship, a value neutral sort. And, um, you know, the first prophet that, uh, presaged the, or, you know, arrival of Christ was Isaiah. I mean, if you're like a Bible prod, that's the way you look at it. Catholics might look at it differently. I honestly don't know. I know something about, uh, Roman Catholic theology, because I had to take it at Leolas, I'm undergrads, but I, I very much elame in it. But, if you're a, if you're a Bible Protestant, um, the view is that, you know, there's a lineage from like Isaiah to John the Baptist, you know, to Christ. And when Isaiah received his vocation, like when, when God spoke to Isaiah and, and, you know, in a foreign, him, he was the B.A. messenger, you know, was what a prophet is. You know, he was overwhelmed by this idea of his unworthiness. You know, he said, um, I, I can't believe that quote, but he said, I'm a man of unclean thought and speech indeed. Okay. And I, I live a midst of people who are equally unclean and their thoughts indeed. I'm not where it served God. You know, you must find a better man. You know, this kind of like implicit kind of the age of the idea that you are destined for greatness. That's completely at odds with the pagan idea and the classical, I mean, the deal of magnet and you know, leg of, uh, and that's that concept of the holy and that bifurcated understanding of the transcendent from the worldly. That's totally alien to the classical perspective. You know, and that's why Leo Strauss, Russell Kerr, Prussia, Eliati, they're always talking about, you know, Athens, Contra Jerusalem. And that's what they were talking about. Okay. And this, uh, Machiavelli is shot through with this. You can go as far as to say that that's the entire catalyst for his discourse. Okay. You could even go as far as to say and Hobbes did reading between the lines. It's clear that he did. You know, a philosophy that's based on faith or premised on a theological paradigm, even as just a framing device, as to what sets the tenor of an absolute morality, which, which must frame discussion of political activity. They can't, this not really properly a philosophy, you know, um, philosophy is an integrated science. Okay. And, um, obviously, in the early modern period, there wasn't this integral view of knowledge, but it's not an accident. I mean, Hobbes literally said he's establishing a geometry, a science of the political that is not going to do with faith based ethics. You know, any more than there's a moral content to studying physics. You know, so Machiavelli kind of agonizing over this stuff, which he did. People don't understand Machiavelli or they, they heard some like rap album or something that envelopes the name or they, they think the colloquialism, SMX will definitive weight. So they think, oh, Machiavelli is like unscrupulous guy rubbing his hands together and talking about spotting against people and it's not Machiavelli was actually like an archimoralist and he was a pious Roman Catholic. And that was exactly why he was, he agonized over this stuff. Like the guy was a moralist. Okay. Um, Hobbes not. And that's essential. You know, um, nevertheless, I would say that serious people who study political philosophy and political theory, there's people who aimed to understand political ontology. And sort of the anthropological causes of political behavior The kind of symbolic psychology that underlies it the kind of data that can be drawn from conditions tending towards war or peace and the cyclical paradigms if they do if they exist that can be identified as you know for the purpose of predictive modeling and analysis You know Those are the kinds of this kind of that tendency that let's split off with hubs People quite literally taught how political ethics and how to manage the demands of moral behavior With the brutal realities of state craft and how these things can be reconciled and what the relationship is between temporal authority and You know moral authority You know, that's that's the Machiavellian enterprise So I mean capital a liberalism it was a lot more to Machiavellian as the hubs Okay, even though people like giant Locke they tried to do in both the language of Hobbes while hanging all this sort of moral contents on The thought experiment or the can read the conceptual model of the state of nature You know, but it was very superficial. I think I think people like Locke are incredibly overrated But this is important because you know It's not this is kind of like linear progression from oh Machiavillia to hub dispinence to you know Conte or whatever it And it's also again like Machiavillia he actually represented the opposite tendency of what people associate them with You know It You know and it's um Something to there there's a parallel That's interesting because both how's the Machiavellian came out of what could be considered You know how's the intellectual progeny of Of The 30 years war like the conditions that created it and obviously in the UK they were hit especially hard even though the even though great Britain The British Isles weren't the battle space You know a microcosm of What was happening in the continent Emerge with the word three kingdoms You know and a promo was a great man You the hero in the Carlyle sense and in the colloquial sense, but That was a tremendously traumatic thing You know That he did You know it was an act a Creative destruction and unlike any other within the political domain, but You know this was This constellation of factors was well underway when Hobbes reached age and majority and Machiavelli was a You know italy I mean italy is still like a mess in terms of its political culture But it quite literally was mired in a perennial civil war That reaches the unit around the Time of a seizure of boredoms stewardship and Magnumly served the court of seizure board over about a year Which had to be something with terrifying experience I mean even if seizure board will like you You know and So the bias in favor of Identifying Remedial measures When conditions tending towards civil war are emerging In both men's Conceptual models, but arguably I mean that's the ultimate challenge of Stay craft as a executive Crisis actor You know and I think people don't necessarily realize that um And aside the fortunes of the Of the Paulus of the state by the nation You know that Stands the tarot self apart If conditions of pennies for the civil war I mismanaged You know your own neck is literally on the line. You know, you're gonna You're gonna you're gonna die with The failed state you preside over I mean not you've got to be prepared for that if you're a Magnum is man or if you know if you're any kind of man worthy of The office or the station but that does tend to In any way to sort of mortal seriousness into the Into the subject matter Um, I think it goes that's saying But that's um It's important contextualize that And like I said I think I think arguably that renders both men's kind of conceptual modeling More relevant than Something this you know only held the screen significance in a The peculiar epoch in which you know their body of work respectively was emergent but The You know And the last thing I'll say the kind of comparative direct comparative Analysis Between the two men you know again my people his whole enterprise was This discursive engagement With their a stoddle Hobbs to the video of the Beth water Hobbs Quite literally said that There was no science of politics before he wrote Leviathan You know he he regarded himself as the true founder of political philosophy You know writing treaties on ethics or on the aesthetic aspects of the Magnum is man or You know agonizing over You know what constitutes a moral life In the core of the prince there's nothing to do with science you know and Thus it has nothing to do with the study of politics Which like physics or like biology is Reducible to a science You know um in How does words These things with a stuff of dreams not science You know And this is important because If you're going to literally craft a science of politics and the central subject matter of the science of politics is To Medicaid or ideally eradicate the state of war within the polity What are you going to be what criteria are you going to base that on like what are your variables what are your inputs? Magnum it easy your input There's got to be some sort of common engagement mechanism That is universally relevant to every constituent member of the body politic And I think you're going to do this last time. Hobbes says well human beings are idiosyncratic in the configuration of their desires and motives and other things, but what is universal to them is there's susceptibility to the economy of violence. And the economy of violence is what governs the state of nature and is the core essence of the political. And there's no idiosyncracy between how men view self-preservation and how they view being availed to a violent death at the hands of the sovereign who wields absolute authority over life and death. You know, that might seem like a base criteria for a variable engagement, but it's a very concrete one. And more importantly, it's a realizable criteria that could be utilized within the geometric paradigm that Hobbes was devising. Something like magnanimity and higher virtue is not a variable that can so constitute such a science. So it doesn't matter that this is debasing the kind of soul of politics or something, or that it's precluding the emergence of men suited to greatness and situated towards those potentialities. You know, because again, it's like it'd be like arguing over, you know, it'd be like saying, I can build the strongest bridge over this ravine or over this chasm based on this structural configuration. But then there's a counter argument emerging that but that bridge isn't beautiful enough. You know, okay, well, you're going to have a bridge isn't going to collapse and people traverse it or you have a beautiful bridge that doesn't work as a bridge. You know, is that reductionist? Yeah. But there is there is an internal logic to that paradigm that is pretty admirable. And again, it helps with the Hobbes if you approach Hobbesian theory like Schmick did. And you know, you don't even need to go as far as the positive well. This is this is a demean human activity that just takes place beyond good and evil. No, we're talking about quite literally the anthropological symbolic psychological and lack of a better descriptor, the mechanistic aspects. That constitute the essence of warrant peace and the economy of violence, which ultimately is, you know, the essence of the political. The now moving on a bit. The some misconceptions of a Machiavelli. I believe. And I reread the prints the other day for preparation for this. I mean, I read it a bunch of times in college and subsequent, but. I believe the chapter on Caesar, Borgia and his machinations, you know, Borgia was the illegitimate son of the pope. This was a very decadent family. And they were incredibly ruthless people. You know, even for that culture and era, I got a lot of up for like, when people, I think they're saying when they're aspects of their passion is really beautiful. I'm not saying bad things about them, but they're capable of incredible violence of a very hot, wanted sort. It's some. I mean, my people are ruthless as fuck, but it's something. There's something there's something frightening about like a spanner and Italian. Um, crisis actor on the work. And there's a kind of genius for the economy of violence, I think. And I stand by that. But, um, the, uh, in talking about the case of Caesar Borgia, not really makes clear. Well, you know, a prince at all times, he should appear manly, you know, morally upright, brave, pious, you know, a religious believer in control is fatally at all time. And so then we want to mock him. Well, he's big, but he was a big critic of Alexander, which is interesting. And he said one of these up, brought Alexander down was that the perception was that he was ruled by his mother and Alexander may have committed a patricide. I find it persuasive that he killed his father, but whether you accept that or not, he would, uh, Alexander has viewed his mom as boy. He was a guy who's dominated by women. And it's not an admirable characteristic. And that's a frailty that is literally fatal in, in power politics. You know, Machiavelli emphasized again and again, these things can't just be superficial appearances. Like you've got to actually aspire to these things. You know, but you've got to be capable of, you've also got to be a capable of being a monster. You know, that doesn't mean that you, you put on ears and act like a degenerate because that makes you hard or something. Not at all, quite the contrary. Machiavelli was very much a believing Catholic. You know, but a man who thinks he's above doing monstrous things can't be a prince because you're going to be called upon to do monstrous things that are totally offensive to your person and that are totally offensive to God. You know, but that's, that's, that's how every prince, that's the trade off of the great wealth and power and a steam of prince enjoys on earth. But that that also, I mean, everybody has their cross to bear. Like every man, no matter how, you know, like, lowly in his worldly station or how elevated. The cross, the prince bears is that he's going to have to do horrible things. Okay. To protect his people, to protect the Paulus, to defeat his enemies, to guarantee that by staring at his dynasty. Oh, these kinds of things. Now, the case of Borgia's interesting because of how Frank Herbert is a big Machiavelli guy and Vlad Mirhardt Conan. He's kind of a pastiche and both a winch dune and a villain who do. I don't think you don't really know his character adequately. But he's in large part Caesar Borgia. He's kind of like a cross between like Caesar Borgia and Stalin. But Borgia was made a, he's made commander of the papal armies by his father. Who was the Pope, Pope Alexander the sixth? The, the papacy of that time was in his Alexander. They were highly reliant on mercenaries and Machiavelli was coming at his point that mercenaries are shit. You know, you've got to have men who are, what will die for the Paulus or die for the state. Interesting, I give you one of the first political theorists that took, who had both the terms state. But, you know, you can't, and all these like Machia movies, it's like this bass and the nation of the queerie. It's better to be like feared or loved. You know, that's not a query in mind. It's obvious. It's better to be like revered. Like if people fear you and the men under your arms fight you because you pay them. Like it's, you're going to be destroyed. spiced like people hate what they fear you know people need to fear your temper they need to fear transgressing you But you know if you're just like object if you're just like over who's this object of fear like mental bay Under pain of mortal jeopardy you're cuz you're paying them You're gonna be murdered at first opportunity, you know, but uh bring it back the The orcini brothers who were very much insinuated into the French court They were these They're these kind of like mercenary aristocrats, you know And The Pope are real problem Okay, because he depended on these guys But their battlefield attitude You know in their ability to Kind of finesse Interstate Power political Concerns and intrigues like as the you know kind of Italian states were worrying with themselves But obviously they've really much had the Vatican kind of by the shorthairs You know What What Caesar bourgeois did The consolidate His own power and Cultivate and carry a view of himself as a liberator The kingdom that was key um To papal authority Owing to the military paradigm in their way Rosalimania So What Caesar bourgeois did was he He basically promised the orcini brothers that If they break what the French court When he conquered Romania You know he Both pay them better and He'd give him official government posts, but he essentially to stand down from military command And the orcini brothers said yeah, that's great, but you're not gonna pass the phyramonia. That's laughable Well, with Caesar bourgeois did was he hired this guy who was an notorious ghoul really Abramero the oracle Ramirez oracle Maggiavoli or Frodo Middle East Okay, and in doing you know the beast Raban this is exactly what Darren Arconan does Ramirez or the oracle he goes through a man. Yeah, he starts utterly brutalizing people you know He slaughters people wholesale. He doesn't give a fuck you know and Caesar bourgeois let this continue for months on end you know and When the people appealed to Alexander like you know, we're being slaughtered and brutalized or wise of being raped or children are being murdered We're living in terror. Well Caesar bourgeois says I'm gonna liberate Ramirez and I'm gonna cut this brute oracle in two and that's exactly what he did You know just like Baron Arconan His big plan was to deploy beast Raban to Arrakis and Raban was such a psychopath and such a brute and such a ghoul that When fate or author you know over through him and like cut him into to liberate Arrakis You know, he he'd be viewed like her at least or like Caesar You know this like great man who not only not only was like a great world lord and a real man But you know a liberator who killed the monster who killed the beast who isn't sleeping us and brutalizing us you know And Machiavelli he says like Caesar bourgeois doing that he's like That wasn't incredibly brilliant thing to do and it was like Machiavelli didn't say like Caesar bourgeois is a nice guy and I wanted to fuck my sister or like I I think he's the kind of person I want to go bowling with and you know like Tells he stories to like he was saying that you know that that that required a genius for intriguing and Ruthlessness most men simply don't possess and Caesar bourgeois Caesar bourgeois ultimately came to a bad end, but He guarded his father's dynasty and posterity and this was a tenuous position too I mean he was he was Here's the illegitimate son of the pope This was delicate, you know So he basically he bought off and neutralized his enemy is his main enemies He pacified Ramanya he conquered it and it's so doing everybody viewed him as a hero You know despite the fact that he caused all of this like that's that's utterly incredible You know like I don't know what else to say about that, but not once that Not once in Machiavelli suggests that this was a good thing, you know, and in fact if anything the There is none of the boroughs that are kind of synonymous with this Literally like in Seftua is kind of Palace intriguing and and this kind of gross brutality It is because of Machiavelli because I mean he described how awful this stuff was but you know it also Represented an aptitude for power that Basically almost nobody possesses and that that's why the Italians are great people It's not it's not just because they make like the best food and really cool sports cars and produce pretty women I mean I like all those things too, but you know, they really do have like a genius for For a for politics of this really sanguine resort You're coming up on an hour. I know well We'll wrap up Machiavelli and get into Spinosa next time if that's okay Sounds good to me Tell everybody where they can find you right now Yeah Jade Burnin I just dropped into episode of Rio of Risha, Carl. I seem to be popping really good My home right now is sub-stech It's real Thomas 777 that's sub-stech that Tom and I can't remember if I shouted this out West week or not I Since we got newtoff at discord. I'm looking for a new home platform to do our like Saturday night streams and I'm gonna start doing them on rumble that seems like a natural fit for us. I've been Playing around with the with the platform Like since we got back from Nashville and I'm comfortable with it. So this Saturday We're gonna go back to our weekly live stream schedule like 9 p.m. Central standard on Saturdays It's not my there's an announcement. I substitute my T-gram. It then they'll be like a link to it But yeah, that's I mean the pros are reconfaring my content, but The sub-stech's popping very good and there's a lot of stuff there. I there's this stuff. I do with Jade Burnin There's a bunch of my own like videos. There's my podcast. There's a bunch of like long-form stuff. There's my science fiction novel that is serialized on there and it's complete form So yeah, if you want to Get engaged with what I do. That's the way to do it All right Thomas. Thank you. So the next episode appreciate you. Yeah I want to welcome everyone back to the Picanana show Thomas is back and we will continue the Series on continental philosophy. Are you done Thomas? I don't pretty well. I I slept a little late today because my sleeve schedule threw up, but I I feel well prepared but if If it seems a Short, that's why so forgive me for that. It was kind of a hectic week. Thankfully, I feel a lot better But I'm still fighting some fatigue and stuff I Read up I study a lot on grotesias the legal theorist, you know, and he was active about 20 years before Hobbes, and he's Hobbes is something of a counterpart to Grotesque, although Grotes rejected the idea that he himself was in the mold of an Aristotelian political theorist, and he rejected outright the idea of a political science, and that's important. And Grotesque really, everybody from Alrundel Holmes, Jr., to HLA Hart, and I would argue even these law and economics types, their spiritual forebearer is Grotesque, and Grotesque is the father-a-leo-positiveism as we know it. There's a lot of capital, El-Wibruz, who like to claim that the idea of a natural right accruing in all humans, the certain protections in law, and things of this nature derived from Grotesque, I think that's what was guided for a lot of reasons. Grotesque was, he was in a hostile dialogue with the concept of natural law, and for complicated reasons, but anybody who picks up Grotesque's love of Warren Peace, which is as magnum opus, will notice to that Carl Schmidt, who is a debt to Grotesque, and there's something peculiar in America, because on the one hand, I mean, I'm convinced the American judiciary is quite literally a positive for you, if Abject, mediocrity. I think a lot of these people don't have any meaningful understanding of the law, like I really don't. That's not just because I have a not flattering view of people in government. I mean, they're conceptual illiterates, like the conceptual syntax of the law, which is pretty complicated at base, they just don't understand it. And I think that's going to become clear. I know a lot of people don't accept that, but if you know what to look for, in reading these opinions, I'm not from the federal bench, it's not just that they're ideal logs who enjoy that pretty pontificate. The reason why they read sociological screeds are like essays, it's because these people don't understand legal reasoning, so they're not really capable of rendering political opinions, because it's like somebody who can't master high school algebra, holding forth on as an MIT lecturer and advance theoretical math or something. There's a peculiar tendency in America to act like there's something like sacrosanct about the law. And I think that's frankly a highly semitic tendency, that's what I said to scope before we're talking about here. But what the people who propose these kinds of things, they invoke kind of like a bastardized legal positivism to sort it up. And then they claim that they reject "religious rationalizations" for right-based paradigms and things, but you can't claim to be a secular ist and then invoke natural law. It doesn't work that way. And you can't claim that the judiciary is somehow sacrosanct. We've all got to take a knee before it, because the law is a sacred thing while acknowledging that legal positivism is basically an empirical and pragmatic enterprise. And that's one of the contradictions I think that is going to prove fatal to this increasingly decrepit of ideological consensus that's reigned since 1933. I mean, I see it's happening over the place, because it just doesn't have a leg to stand on in terms of precedent. And it's when you're talking about a body of law and the theoretical foundations of it, you can't rely on a toxicology, you know, for reasons that someone which are obvious and some maybe not so obvious, but you know, this isn't a superficial thing. It's got a new laptop and still kind of figuring out, I'm sorry, let me try to open this fucking window. There we go. But yeah, the law, the law of warrant peace, the greatest was most active in the early 17th century. He was born in 1583. And yeah, his the law of warrant peace was his most significant work. And again, this proceeded, this proceeded, Hobbes' body of work by about 20 years. That'd be clear to like Graudier's, he wasn't interested in establishing a paradigm of producing a central treaties. It's simply on positive law. It's not limited exclusively to law of nations or what we consider international law in some rudimentary sense. But that is its central focus. And the law of nations and Graudier's opinion, it derives from practical reason. And it comes into existence by way of consentless of the body politic within, you know, the several states that constitute you know, a political structure between governments. So there's an interconnectivity here that you know has to be abided. So you can't talk about positive law in discrete terms, you know, that are categorically isolated from the systemic whole. The way to understand it is kind of like a statement of what the Romans have been considered the public law, you know, the just publicum, you know, from the perspective of a science if you will. Okay. But again, Graudier's conspicuously distinguished his enterprise from that of Aristotle. He said, there isn't a science of politics. There's a science of a law wherein, you know, order can be imposed on political impulses, which are often pre-rational. And although predictable and cyclical and, you know, arguably conducted within parameters of bound irrationality, you know, particularly in zenith and the expression of these impulses, which is, you know, the state of war that doesn't mean that there's some underlying science to political behavior or, you know, the manner in which nations conduct each other in their efforts to survive and perpetuate their existence and capture power from their rivals. But the law, however, can be understood through, you know, the lens of of a systemic science, you know, that framework at least. Graudier's is the first thinker as far as I know in the Western canon who held himself out held out his body of work is juristic, purely juristic, because opposed to a philosophical or theological treatment of politics. And the law borne peace and kicked off this entire body of work in Western Europe that dealt with treaties on the public law, the laws of nations. And this tendency kicked off, you know, again, in the 16th century and really continued until, you know, the end of the 18th century. And that's really interesting. There's a significance there. And it's not, it's not just the fact of, you know, the century leading up to the 30 years of war was very anarchic. But there's some that there's like an apoccal significance in terms of The development of of Europe's intellectual heritage that You know, it is the reason for this. I'm convinced you know, it's something that would require a way of away more thorough investigation, but the central premise of The law of war and peace and grudiest his entire body of work Is the idea that man is by nature a rational and social animal, okay? That doesn't mean that everything man does is is derive some rationality and again he acknowledges that politics often It's derivative of pre-rational impulses but Man is capable of a reason and that's what distinguishes him from beasts of the field and Ultimately You know man is most expedient in Looking after what's gonna guarantee his own self preservation Okay, and this is a point to that is echoed very much in a Hobbes, okay? Almost certainly Hobbes read a lot of grotesque, you know different as they were in terms of their Supositions on political ontology but You know it's Rodeous conspicuously to he attract he attacked the the classical idea of conventionalism and Classical natural right does distinguished from Thomas to natural rights You know, which is basically a risked a trillion model Which as we got into an earlier episode suggests not just that It's you know it's a Dispositive component to the essential natures of different kinds of men like what their station is and What their potentialities are what the potential items are their soul? you know and this idea that Convention or you know justifies itself by its tendency to be perpetuated You know this is suggestive of You know Institutions being the product of a a preordained Structure and things Grotes rejects that and Interestingly he attacks it in part in the form of a dialogue and One of the recurring characters in his dialogue was Carnietus Carnietus was a he was the head of the the Athenian Academy During what was called the skeptical period around the 150s BC um And Grotes has carniettes argue and plead the cases Foreign against like various tendencies That Grotes either wants to explicate or contrast with his conceptual paradigm or that he wants to attack outright and attempt to impeach Basically Well, you can derive from these dialogues. It's Grotes is saying what All of us is is these are These are these are rules that man is imposed upon himself collectively, you know in In Congress with the social organism of which he's a part For a reason that expediency and self-protection You know and yeah from place to place and culture to culture and race to race You know laws of very But there are certain commonalities that derive from that Corrational impulse and The law is the product of that capacity to reason but that doesn't Mean that there is some law of nature strictly speaking You know All men are impelled In Grotes' view by natural desires Towards ends that are ultimately advantageous to themselves and are largely exclusivist and Yes, man as a social organism and unless men are truly Possessed to pure avarice they're not going to go out of their way as Individuals to harm their fellows for just you know for Its own sake But the other day In Grotes' paradigm these these consensus don't emerge that impose law upon the body politic or the social organism You know based upon some immutable Natural law that can be Identified and divinated by I just like a learned cast of jurists or by you know resort to Pious reflection on You know the the conscience of the inner witness or by you know the study of Scientific principles that you know seem to suggest a harmonious order to the universe you know be it physical properties or the metaphysical permutations of you know value judgments and things You know Consequently there is no there is no form there is no justice that is natural to man other than you know remedies for social evils that derive from This capacity for higher reason you know and man's ability to calculate those remedies and Congress with others you know as part of a social organism You know suggest that man is capable of higher purposes in his designs and plans but again, you know we're back to this impulse towards Self-preservation and self-protection and the practical business of governance in lieu of energy and reversion of savagery we're we're not talking about identifying You know the some godly or metaphysically present or epistemically prior you know body of knowledge or something that that Just adheres to some perfect concept of justice or something You know and like I said any what really jumps out of me is sitting grotesque and the manuscript I'm writing right now grotesque features rather large And I got I got turned on to grotesque before I went to law school not anybody cares This for context I started reading them when I was under red because I realized this I bumped up again again Against this this kind of peculiar sort of bastardized claim That cloked itself in the language of positive law yet was returning to natural law arguments, but again not ones that were familiar and precedented you know, it's kind of like what is this and I I realize well, it's It's an effort by you know liberals and progressives and People with kind of utopian ideas that were common to the to the New Deal era and especially the postwar years the that draw upon legalism and and and attempt to Suggest that a layer heritage between themselves and you know the the progenitors of uh of kind of modern legal theory which I accidentally we used to some you know And any such person trying to Lay claim to grotesque or lay claim to the man was as there But yeah, so it would jump out to me first and foremost was you know, this is Algorithm to homes and H.O. Layhardt and that's you know where they that's probably great legal positive is Releal realists would you know that would be their starting point so that that's important um And the same Finally too, Graudius, he and Duane peach stoicism as well as Epicurianism and a lot of his dialogues where Carnietis is like a main character and that's not exit down. Carnietis was very heterodox and he was an enemy of the stoics and intellectual terms which was unusual, at least in the way he went about it. Like to be clear, the stoics technically fell in the skeptic camp. Even though there's some concept of like a monadic unity to reality that presumably contained at least an aspect of a will of the gods or a metaphysical prime move on. You know, obviously that that's at odds with a pure skepticism of the kind that it took and rooted the academy but it's still outside the scope and it's complexity, the argument I mean. But it's not an accident that Graudius suggested this setting and the characters that he did for these thought experiments. That's important for context is what I mean. But he also took a lot from the stoics and I think that that's why Graudius, another secondary reason why he went on his way to make much of the aspects of their ethical posture and their ontological claims that he disagreed with. Graudius did accept, again, men are in their natural state, impaled really merely preserved their own being, their own physical essence. This is distinguished from wanting to seek pleasure and avoid pain. You know, you can train an animal to seek pleasure and avoid pain. Graudius isn't saying that man is basically a highly capable animal who's at first of one kind of stimulus and favors another. That's not what he's saying. He's saying that from jump or from this beginning point, man's capable of conceptualizing what is going to preserve himself and he's also capable of contemplating a posterity beyond himself, whether it's his nation or his tribe or his direct lineage. You know, it's not self preservation and the basis most primitive sense. I mean, I was that's a component of it. But again, this is derivative of man's nature as the exclusive beneficiary of higher capacity to reason in a way that sets him apart from all of the life forms. And that's why he denies that this is the defining quality of man. You know, this might be the behavioral paradigm that gives rise to all theoretical structures that come to constitute, you know, the political and the juristic framework that makes the political possible. But, you know, these things derive from the capacity to reason and that is what is the definitive quality of man. So simply stated to Grotesque that kind of core original desire to preserve one is natural physical constitution and guarantee one's posterity that's essentially a hard wire to instinctive or subconscious drive in man to realize it's full nature and to grow and develop and continue to develop as a rational being, capable of higher reason. So the rational faculty is the essential quality of man. And you know, that can be said to be the most excellent and the highest of all the original or natural desires for instincts or tendencies within man. And for another reason that it makes all other human activity possible. You know, and it's this rational faculty which precedes justice as virtuous because justice makes it possible to live in society and living in society is the only way that this rational faculty and man's excellent and a higher nature can truly flourish. You know, so Grotesque is saying that the classical view as well as the Thomas view is backwards, you know, in the way it describes, you know, the ontology of these things as well as the metaphysics of virtue, you know. And this is a very novel argument, you know, and people who take notice there's nothing in this that suggests some like equilitarian or, you know, remedial social justice in terms of equalizing tendencies. There's nothing like that in here because Grotesque never made those claims. You know, so this idea that as some early and not so really progressives claim that well, you know, Grotesque is describing the essential nature of man like vesting in the human being, like, the human being rather than suggesting that it vests in that human being station or that, you know, his function, you know, be it a landlord or a father or a patriarch or slave or a king, you know, the idea of that essence, the essential nature of vesting in the human being and the pen of function, see that that's the first suggestion of a progressive view of the human being and, you know, the dignity of the human being. That's nonsense. Nothing like that is being suggested. Again, anybody who claims that what they're doing is they're making a positiveist argument while injecting these kinds of undefinable in concrete terms, you know, metaphysical characteristics of the human being and suggesting that the substance of justice has to be the realization of the dignity of every human being which seems almost always entailed some kind of wishful filaments that, you know, doesn't really have to do with, you know, capital S society or with improving upon the human being's moral character, you know, nor of perfecting the rationality of the human being which you think that somebody would consider paramount if they're true humanists, but that I, I'm not trying to rant about a tangential subject, but this is important because you'll find all kinds of treatments agrogeous that from the, especially in the last 50 years that are kind of through the lens of people like either John Rawls or these kinds of bastardized progressiveist screeds and that are always trying to claim, you know, modern political theorists as as their own but um to bring it back. Grotesque description and his impeachment of the concept of natural right, as conventionally understood, that's the key to understanding since his conceptual paradigm. It's interrelation to this conception of man as a rational and social animal that any notion of right and any concept of political society are of the understood. Right and its primary meaning to Grotesque is that which is just. And that which is just is that what facilitates society and the man finding society within a political organism. So again, what's right is what is just, is what derives from practical reason. And what derives from practical reason is the highest good because it's the most excellent human characteristic. And it's the most excellent human characteristic because it allows man to fully flourish and realize his exceptional potential as an organism. And what is unjust thus is anything that is in conflict with the nature of society between human beings who are endowed with the aforementioned higher reason. And interestingly, Grotesque quotes Cicero and Senna to shore up this statement. I believe that's him invulking a kind of loose model of praxis or something at least suggestive of that. West people dismiss these things as just axioms and posh it's about what can be identified as the good in kind of axiomatic terms. Obviously to the great Roman statesman, you know, the natural attraction of men to society and their ability to act and conformity with that instinctive attraction would be something very worthy of praise and discussion. I'm not enough of a Roman historian. I'm not like a class was, I know something about Doric Athens but I'm not qualified enough to speak on why he chose Cicero and Senna. I've got to say Caesar probably would have been quite involved but again, I'm not I'm not learning the subject matter in a way that can sustain she that posh it with. You know, so proudly speaking, the crime is an act of injustice because it's destructive of trust generally within the social organism. You know, for example, you steal from somebody, you steal what belongs to others. It's not just harming that person and violating that person's trust in their fellow man, you're undermining the basis of all trust and therefore of society. And you're acting against the natural order to which man belongs. You know, which in addition to being a pragmatic affair, the structuring of the social organism in society, it also reflects man's capability towards the flourishing of his excellence. So really all injustice is merely injustice. There's not some that's acceptable and some that's not. You know, basically any unjust act is as bad as any other. You know, and this is what kind of eliminates the distinction between, you know, a kind of civic morality and, you know, a true morality, if you will. A lot of positive law theorists subsequently made that distinction very enthusiastically and anyone who reads grotesque realizes that there is no such distinction. In fact, the core tenet is that that's an artificial paradigm. You know, or it's just an incorrect way of understanding what's under discussion. Probably went, okay, I was just checking on our time. You know, and similarly, you know, the law of nature is such that it exists. Again, not natural law, but the law of nature. The, the conditions that attached to things that, from which, you know, the social organism derives in terms of its structure and, you know, the behavioral modes and coming upon parties to it and things like that. The law of nature permits a person to kill somebody escaping with stolen property. You know, if, for example, it's not possible to otherwise recover their stolen property. You know, but the reason why that's acceptable is because, again, it's not that, you know, property is so very important. And it's not because, you know, any individual man is permitted to desaceate some sort of instinct towards vengeance, if somebody steals from him. It's because, again, to commit a crime is to commit, is to do violence to the entire concept of trust and the threatened, the totality of the enterprise. So any miscreant, so disposed, needs to be eliminated with extreme prejudice, because it's not a matter of, precisely because it's not a matter of individual rights. You know, it's a matter of collective defense. And without the social organism and the laws that both derive from and facilitated, no man's property, no man's life, no man's family is safe and can be secure. And that's the nature of justice in Grotesque's paradigm. And that's interestingly, there's a selective invocation of that reasoning, and a somewhat perverse capacity that's traditionally invoked by enemies in the death penalty. That's an issue that's kind of falling off. I was thinking about this, forget the tangent, but there's a de-santis. Ford is executing a huge amount of people lately. I think they've already executed seven people this year. And there's two more guys. There's two more condemned detainees, and the San is just sign their death warrant, literally. One of them is particularly horrible in bizarre case. This guy committed this brazen rape on a homicide of this poor lady, in a fairly public place. And it's definitely kind of a textbook case of what's the euphemistically called special circumstances, which digeria or aggravating circumstances that permit the imposition of the crime. of the of capital liability. But any event what jumped out at me is this was in the national news cycle. I think probably more because people are kind of like a passing interest into Santa's and the facts this case are so horrible and lured. But you know, really until I mean, you're a little more than me. Remember this too. There used to be this really impassioned discussion and opposition to the death penalty. And it's really kind of gone away. You know, I don't it's just not something people really engage with anymore. But traditionally, there's this kind of egalitarian or not a yeah, there's the egalitarian argument, which is what's arbitrary and capricious who gets executed. But then there's a they they didn't vote this kind of pragmatic argument that well, if if if if if a capital if camel punishment doesn't add it what we functioning as a deterrent, then it can't be justified. And that's really not precedent in terms of why men are put to death. You put to death because that's the punishment because like scripture tells us, you know, the blood of the victims cry out the heaven for vengeance. And like Demonstrous said, you know, the essence of sovereignty is the power of life and death. So if the sovereign is going to say, I'm going to let some miscreant murder people with impunity. And I'm going to hamstring myself and deny myself the same power. Then what's purportedly the sovereign isn't actually sovereign. It's some sort of gilded, you know, imposter. But such that there is precedent. I mean granted the the argument that is outlined that was often involved by opponents, capital punishment that that's it's a bastardized version of the argument. But it is whether they realize they're not derivative of this kind of early positive law paradigm. That's what the nature is of justice and things of that nature, which is interesting. But again, I realize younger people probably aren't going to be familiar with the fact that there was this tremendous debate over death penalty issues. And the kind of the kind of resolution of that and gun rights. I know there's a lot of bluster and a lot of cap about, you know, from the regime and these functionaries saying they want to ban guns. But that's not that's not going to happen. You know, and I got mixed feelings of the Supreme Court enforcing the Second Amendment against the states. But regardless of those concerns, just the fact that it has been incorporated against the states means that it's essentially a settled issue. Like private ownership of firearm just never going to be categorically banned. And the death penalty is never going to go away nationally. You know, the states that have it, it's going to continue in earnest. Then it's just kind of off the table. And that's fascinating because it represents a sea change. So, you know, this is the key kind of takeaway. And the reason why I keep invulking these examples of how this paradigm, that grotesque, you know, developed, deference from contemporary perspectives, is a because it's completely at odds with the idea of human rights as we would think of it. You know, or the idea of subjective rights that, you know, held by the person simply as a human being, you know, and not embodying objective qualities again, such as that of a master, a slave, a ruler, or a father, or head of a household, or a landowner. You know, there is some sort of connection between grotesses, body of theory, and the kind of fully realized contemporary idea of absolute subjective rights. But that's not unlike, you know, like, there's a connection between murks and haggle, you know, that doesn't mean that hagg alienism is truly, you know, the ethical forebearer of Marxism or something. You know, and if you accept the, you know, anxiety that the dialectical process is kind of like the prime agents in the development of political and sociological structures, you know, there's going to be cross-pollination between monumental ideas, obviously, that doesn't suggest some sort of unimpeded lineage, or like some unsullied heritage between, you know, what came before in the present. It just means that nothing occurs in isolation, and particularly not, you know, matters of political significance that impact the psychological environment in just positive ways and, you know, inform and impact these structures in the real world. I mean, that should be obvious, I anticipate some pushback on this, so I'm kind of trying to, or maybe not, but I'm trying to preclude some of that, and I mean, and that's totally legitimate. I mean, I'm not saying people shouldn't call me out on some of these things. It's a complicated subject matter, but it's important to clarify, and not just because I'm interested in depriving the regime of credibility in terms of the intellectual precedent that it claims to be the heirs to. But I think that's important too, or appropriate, obviously, but this not the kind of linear view of historical process is as insidious for the similar, for similar reasons. You know, it kind of cuts off not just critical analysis, but constructive structuring and conceptual terms of what came before, and that really precludes a meaningful diagnosis of, you know, the state of things, particularly again in dialectical and psychological terms. And these things are paramount if, you know, you're a political theorist or if you're a a layman who dedicated himself to this subject matter, you know, like I am. It's, uh, there's also, and this isn't as developed at least, uh, in grotesque main body of work. The kind of final iteration of right as a naturally occurring phenomenon derived from these structures that, you know, are the product demands higher rationality and the social organism that encompasses. um. and is the product of the capability. The kind of. The kind of unexamined aspect of that is. that which obliges the men to act correctly. Not just to refrain from doing things that violate the public trust and the. conferences in the essential aspects of the social organism and political society. But. There's a natural sanction that. must attend people who refrain from correct action. And people who deliberately shirt their obligations, they're in. And. That kind of volitional understanding of right and that kind of affirmative obligation towards action of a certain type within the penumbra of justice. We're probably talking about what citizenship is. But it's not. It's distinguishable from an active citizenship because it's explicitly more. And that warrants a kind of deeper dive. I've got my own thoughts on that. But I've got to. I'd have to delve deeper into some of the grotesque or esoteric stuff. And particularly the dialogues that he wrote. You know, but this is another aspect that. You know, kind of. removes. this entire theoretical model from the merely pragmatic utilitarian. You know, you don't impose affirmative duties for the sake of mere pragmatism. You know, in the purely utilitarian model of what constitutes the. the duties of. and coming upon individuals in the social organism. It basically stops at non-interference. You know, and. I think. There's more of. There's at least an Aristotelian echo in Grodius, much as he saw it that it extinguished himself from. political theorists. I think that that owes more to just that. I think you wanted to make it clear that he wasn't suggesting. some. overall theory of politics. He was suggesting. a science of the law, which had anthropological and psychological aspects that were explanatory of. the human condition within this narrow domain of human activity. You know, that domain being, you know, within political society. I. I don't read. into that some sort of. blanket repudiation of. you know, Aristotelian political ontology. But again, um. I. I'd have to dive deeper into the subject matter. That's. That's not only got in Grodius for today. I hope that was worthwhile. It's a very complicated subject matter. I mean, that's not said that this. you know, the. the subs can follow this stuff as. as well as I can. I wasn't suggesting anything like that. But. it can be difficult to make it interesting. But it's important. It's. the essential foundation of. of some of what we're going to get into. I was contemplating. I want to cover. Calvin and Martin Luther. I think that that's important. But to be fair. that means I should also cover a coinus. And I've got to bone up on that. Because I'm not. Roman Catholic. And when I was at Loyola, I had to read a coinus. And everyone should read a coinus anyway. But. and the interest is kind of like equal time. And it probably seems like I should have. arguably like after the Cittities. I should have. we should have gotten into a coinus in the scholeistics. But to be fair. you know, I'm a political theorist at base. And I wanted to emphasize the trajectory of political theory within the continental tradition. And. you know. if it seems like I'm jumping around to go back to a coinus and scholeisticism. As we're reading about reformation thinkers, I wanted to include. They're in. I mean, theology is always in dialogue with theology. There's something about it that is kind of outside of. temporal politics. I mean, it's not to say that. The theological considerations aren't impacted by political and cultural variables that are. temporally sensitive. Obviously, it continues to be. Obviously, they are. But I think it makes sense to deal with the. the directly theological. aspects, you know, kind of in succession. So. I got to think about this for a minute. But yeah, I. If not next session, the following one I'm going to get into. Kelvin and Martin Luther. If that sounds agreeable, man, it's your show. Study both of them at length. Let's go to it. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's great. Yeah, all right, man. I hope this was worthwhile to the subs. Well, it all. It seems to me when you look at Grudius considering he's talking about natural law, the fact that he's also a humanist, there's tension there. So it's going to be. It seems like it's going to be complicated. Yeah, and the law is always. When you're talking about the law, unless you're literally talking about. Unless you're talking about, you know, any of the most basic and primitive. You know, like a penal code that just sanctions obvious violations of the person's property or their bodily integrity. You're talking about. You're talking about like conceptual models that are like abstractions built on abstractions. And, you know, one of the reasons, like I'll have one of the homes, you know, I hear you at the point that the law is always politicized. You know, and people who can't accept that, they're going to resort to this kind of increasingly tortured reasoning that's trying to suggest that, you know, well, you know, the law is just sort of like learned science of ethics. You know what I mean? That's spinning things off into all kinds of sophistry, a total logical nonsense, but it's. Yeah, it's. What also too, I mean, there's just. There was a. it's kind of remarkable to like this. the like the 15, 16 and 17 centuries, you had. there was. like the politics of Europe were incredibly complicated, you know, and you still had. you know, sectarian matters, we're still having a huge impact on I'm warrant peace question of mental data affairs. You know, the scientific revolution was going full steam. You know, the modern state was arriving in, you know, imposing genuine future shock. On populations, you know, the first industrial revolution. was kicking off, you know, and so your head really, really great minds writing on matters of politics. And, you know, it's, yeah, it's really fascinating and contemplative, but yeah, we'll continue this series in earnest. And yeah, I was, like I said, I'm still, I'm not, I'm feeling good, but I'm still struggling with fatigue a little bit. So, like, forgive me if I see a little low energy. No, I hope I didn't convey that. I'm no worries. Do, uh, quick plugs. Well, get out of here. Yeah, I, uh, I'm trying to increase the volume and frequency of my content on Substack. Yeah, I'm doing a lot of collabs and just collab with Joel Davis. I'm doing the world at War Collab with, you know, my dear friends Adam and Nick at the Myth of 20th Century podcast. I just dropped another episode of Radio Free Chicago, which is my collab with Jake Burton. You know, you can find all that stuff plus like the Mind Faser pod on my Substack. It's real time is 777 that's Substack.com. As I think I mentioned before, I'm kind of restructuring my content. But my Substacks, you're one stop shop right now. You know, um, I'm on Instagram, on Telegram, on YouTube. I'm a lot of places, but my long form stuff, my podcast content, you can find my Substack. I mean, see me the one platform that doesn't censor me. Despite the fact I never buy a TOS anywhere, but that's that's where you should go for now and just search around, um, like on Spotify, you'll find my stuff on YouTube, you'll find my stuff. And like I said, I'm I'm trying to structure things to make it easier to find all of my shit. So moving forward this summer, we'll get there. All right. Thank you. It's all kind of a couple of days. Yeah, man. I want to welcome everyone back to the Peacanana show or back with Thomas for another episode on Continental Philosophy. Thomas, take us away. Please. Yeah. And I'm sorry for the height. It sounds really sick because I think I shot it out on my T-Ramp. We're going to deal with Hagel today. And this is going to be a two or three part treatment. Everybody else I'm jumping around a bit, but it's important to contextualize kind of philosophy. I mean, it's actually essential. In a way, it's not for some other subject areas that are less kind of a numbering in their, in their significance. And subsequent to this Hagel treatment, I want to do a single episode or two on theology. I want to deal with Aquinas and Martin Luther and Calvin, you know, because I think it's essential to address a Aquinas within that same discussion. And if it seems like a conceptual bias because of my own, confessional heritage, please let me know that, let me give the subs I mean. And I'll tweet how I break it down, but I thought about this because I certainly don't want anyone to feel offended or slighted. And I think that's the sensible way to proceed. And Aquinas really would broaden Aristotelianism to the West. I mean, obviously learned men and especially church men, you know, obviously they were very, they weren't just competent in ancient languages. They were amongst the stewards of the classical intellectual canon. It sounds like this was unknown, but this is what really sort of brought Aristotelian thought paradigms into what we think of as European philosophy. But Hagel, when I'm talking about political theory, we're talking about Hagel. Just in absolute terms. And even if you're talking about Anglo-Saxon political philosophy, as this thing goes from the continental tradition, it's still in dialogue with Hagel. And that's key. Hagel in my other than Hobbes, Hagel is really the only pure political theorist. Like, it's not to say that there's not a complex metaphysical understanding within Hagel. There absolutely is. It's not to say that he doesn't have a general theory in knowledge, obviously he does because anybody who posits a theory of mind is dealing fundamentally with a metaphysical tradition that you know, originates with classical Athens. But his subject matter is to explicate man's experience as a historical agent. And Hagel's discussion of political ontology, it's fundamentally existential. It's bound up with what man is. And it's bound up with mind in a way that's an extricable. And that's something that people misunderstand. Hagel wasn't some, he didn't have some idolatrous view of the state. He didn't view the state as a marvelous godly thing. And he didn't view the modern state as it existed, you know, really from the 15th century on, where he didn't view it as some perennial thing. His point was that the way that the state is structured, that's essential to understanding human praxis. And it really is an externalization of processes of mind. You know, and there's an internal logic to statecraft that really can be understood in Higaylian terms as a providential move on. That's what the source of it is. And to know that process is to understand reason, quay reason. And, you know, man being created in the image of God is the only organism capable of reason, you know, in higher rationality. And to perceive the historical process of which the state is but one aspect is to perceive the mind of God. And to participate in statecraft is for man to reconcile this kind of inner psychological existence with the pragmatic reality of, you know, his own mortality and his desire to create enduring structures and to bring formal and symbolic things that he holds to be sacrosanct as well as practical things that prosaic and related to mere survival is taken as the process of which these things are brought into corporeal reality. So that's what I think of it. He's not saying the state is wonderful or the state is something that we should review at all. Like what he's saying is that politics and political life of which the state is the subject matter. You know, is the instantation of man's inner psychological experience which partakes of, you know, the divine spark in man whereby, you know, he is the literal progeny of God. Okay. So that's key. And he also wasn't saying again, when he talks about the state, he's not falling into this trap that a lot of neo-realists do and a lot of political science types in the 20th and 20th century are who are fixated on this kind of empirical modeling. But he's not saying that the state as we know it in his epoch or even a thousand years prior, a thousand years subsequent, he's not saying that the peculiar configuration of any even era of the state is somehow essential. There will always be some kind of state, even if it's a minimal state in the way, you know, people like Murray Rothbard thought about it, you know, and even somebody like myself, you know, I am very much a band artist in my disposition and part of the reason why I'm committed to this current law and form manuscript I'm working on is because I'm constantly trying to, you know, assist in understanding that the Westphalian state is dead and what's going to succeed is what's important. And then it's not going to But it's not really going to resemble the 20th century state, managerial state. Nor is it going to resemble some sort of scaled down version of that same conceptual paradigm and enterprise. You know, but that doesn't matter. Even if we're talking about, you know, a structure of kind of a, where by remedial justice is premised on self-help and we're private actors are primarily responsible for what you're to for. And the modern era has been the exclusive domain of public authority. We're still talking about state crap. We're still talking about a kind of state. A state is literally that like a present sense experience of deliberate political authority derived from an ongoing historical process that we can interpret through our faculty for both practical and higher reason. You know, that's what he's talking about. Like state has been kind of a dirty word, especially in rhetorical capacities where people think that we're exhumantically talking about, you know, some kind of bloated bureaucratic 20th century type state that is simply is endured in the 20th century, you know, and a basic and flexibility of the current system. You know, and that's something that people need to remedy. You know, but so there's a, you know, hey, and finally before I get into like the meat of this, you know, again, like any, whether people think they are or not, people find themselves well done the right and the left making haggily in our humans, even if they don't realize it. You know, and that that's that's essential to I think because most people haven't read a halo because it's, I mean, to me, it's particularly art of words, but if it's not your subject theory or your research concentration, you know, it can, it can seem daunting to take, to take on a study of halo, but. Hagle's thought is singularly and remarkably systemic and they can't be overstated. Because most impactful and significant works, I think in arguably are elements of the philosophy of right. I'm going to butcher this pronunciation, but the original title, the German title is "Gruining the philosophy, this works, elements of the philosophy of right." It's a tome, almost pure theory. And I'd say complimentary to elements of the philosophy of right, where it's essays on then contemporaneous government and processes of government that, you know, he viewed as an extricably related to this durable process. He wrote a series of essays on the German Constitution when he was young that I can say are essential reading. And then decades later, he wrote this very detailed treatment of the British reform bill, which changed everything. I mean, there's a number of reform bills in the UK. I'm talking about the 1830 reform bill that, you know, it's expanded the voting franchise to basically, you know, every male citizen of majority who wasn't, you know, in a workhouse or a jail. But, you know, this was both of these, despite being discreet and temporally situated, impecule or in particular ways, both of these kind of bodies of essays, you know, they were singular and thorough examples of Higulean praxis. But, again, conceptual modeling and praxis within the Higulean paradigm, that's something of a distinction without categorical difference. What I mean by that is Higule's philosophy of right. He's not talking about right in the way that humanists talk about it or the way that, you know, somebody like John Locke talked about it. He's basically talking about, you know, natural law in like a quasi-tomest sense. But Higule's philosophy of right and thus his philosophy of statecraft, it's really inseparable from his philosophical teaching and doctrine as a whole. And, again, this is far more systemic and integrated than most other thinkers. You know, and this is clear really from the moment that somebody takes on a study of Higulean thought. And this echoes this and his stuff on the hard sciences as well as metaphysics in the science of logic and the encyclopedia of the philosophical sciences. Higule talks about a universal history that is the product of eternal reason and the cutting of reason and the revelation of this process, you know, whereby man can apprehend it and, you know, through his capacity, his own capacity for higher reason, you know, the dialectical process then becomes this ongoing, tautological developmental paradigm. You know, so in the final analysis, reason, quiet reason and history in this struggle process, these are not separable. The unfolding of reason. The revelation of the mind of God, you know, it parallels this struggle process because there's synonymous, you know, and in that way, this struggle process is fundamentally rational, you know, and that's why misguided as, again, a lot of these contemporary political sciences may be in their methodology. I'm not making an argument, like some of the vinesians do, and that, you know, modeling is a fool's errand and impossible. Like it absolutely is possible. It's just that the criteria and the inputs that are being employed aren't the correct ones. That's somewhat tangential, but that's important to understand. Essential to Hagelian thought is the concept of siphish kites, literally ethical life or ethical order. The concept of siphish kites that rugged cells, the apparent polarity and irreconcilability between metaphysics and historiography and engaged praxis within political life, as Hable described it, it represents quote, the life of the states within individuals. Or probably more properly within individual minds. Okay. It attitudes of moral, or theological, or self-conslee intellectual nature, you know, the common critique is that well, political philosophy is a domain of academics and for a large part of the history of the West. We know it's a domain of a mannatically cloistered churchmen. You know, and according to a lot of enlightenment theorists, this is incorrect because it's not pragmatic and it's somehow divorced from the reality of steep left. Hable suggested that's absolutely incorrect. Okay. This kind of contemplative orientation. It doesn't all reject the proverbial sound and fury of political reality, war and peace, or the struggle of the classes or anything else, like whatever your chosen emphasis of subject matter. You know, conceptual political life and the practice of the political are synonymous in Higeyoena thought. It is through the state. And again, we're not talking about the state as if it's some object of reverence or anything and of itself. This is value neutral. Okay, but it is through the state, whatever configuration the state takes and any given epoch, that the individual man, you know, gains a true reality as his conceptual existence comes to full flourishing and he partakes of that universal history and the cunning of a reason, which is the mind of God at work and man's affairs. You know, and through this process, this is how the state you know, comes to devise laws and the sovereign actor being the only agent that can implement universally binding strictures through instituting laws. You know, man in his in his psychological cloister of inter-life, such that he experiences it, um, participates in this universal historical process. You know, even if he's only so situated as an observer who can perceive what is underway. Okay. And finally, a state that's at all legitimate and this is key and I'm always making the point that he goes exymatically a right wing thinker and will get deeper into what I mean by that as we go on. But at the end of the day, the only state that is legitimate, the only state that protects of this aforementioned process and thus reflects, you know, high irrationality and practical reason is based on morality because morality itself is derivative from reason and morality seeking universality and the flourishing through universality and absolute application. This can only be realized and actualized by being incarnated in institutions and manners. Um, manners and morals are one way to understand Ziplich's right, Ziplich's right, Ziplich's right, um, in other words, the life of the state is really the life of the culture, the constitute of the constitute of individuals and their devotion to a discrete way of life bound up with manners and morals, which themselves derive from a historical mode of existence. Okay, and it's through this is this is the topology too of racial and cultural posterity. You know, the state derives from this psychological existence of man with and it gives him a training and an education and habituates him to the manners and morals of his culture or his race and these things that's, you know, this is a educational mechanism and a mech and it means of imbuing people with cultural competence but these institutions themselves, you know, derive from the psychological interlives of people who are the constituent elements of that culture. You know, so it's a topology but not in punitive terms. It's kind of a feedback loop. Okay, and this is where the devotion to a state or a political order derives from, you know, and this is one of the this is a base why secular regimes fail because they're not premised on anything that's that's truly human. You know, no, nobody's going to devote their their lives, you know, nobody's going to invest this kind of higher moral value and some sort of abstract theory of, you know, distributive justice. You know, um, this should be obvious, I think, but I think many people don't fully understand the kind of constituent elements of that perspective. You know, and in order to develop a full conceptual picture. So there's so there's a, so there's an ontological and existential significance to political order, you know, and and and and the state. It's not merely a pragmatic derivation, you know, but again, it's not to say the state is some ending itself, you know, by virtue of its mere existence, you know, be it merely perfunctory or profound. Um, the uh, it is true, you know, and again, like any any any praxis, you know, derives from an ontological imperative and thus the state can be said to constitute a kind of final end for the individual in order to find truth within his own existence. You know, and the revelation of things like duty and uh, the satisfaction and actualization or appearance or at least uh, the suggestion of the divine in the external world. But again, this is a this is a reciprocal relationship, you know, essentially reciprocal, even total logical again. Um, you know, it's only a final end to the extent which the political order derives from practical reason and higher rationality, which is essentially human and exclusively human, but also only can come to fruition in conditions where human minds can perceive the process that is underway, you know, and and those participate in the dialectical, you know, the phenomenon of higher dialectics. Okay. Um, you know, so there's there's not a there's not a trend to give moral content to the state other than what, you know, um, human and discreetly and cultural and and conventional practices and morals, you know, bring to it and um, this kind of a reciprocal cycle of development. You know, um, and as the individual goes beyond the level of his private discreetly personal thoughts and passions and wishes, you know, this um, this process of the flourishing of higher reason through the political order and state craft is what he will call the subjective mind. I've heard people refer to it as the collective subconscious as if there's some sort of a young yen implication. That's not the way to think of it. It's a, it's far more kind of brass tax and categorically essential than that. But through the dialectical process and through the state and its development, The individual man becomes habituated to universalizing his wishes in terms of his political existence and his life as a historical, as a historically situated actor. Because again, the state being the exclusive sovereign agents with the power, excellent potential to implement universally binding laws, that's the only thing that can be the subject matter of this process, as a prepraxis. The state is a reality, not projects, and this is key as well. It's not some modality of social engineering. It drives from the way man lives his life and thinks his thoughts. It's the means by which the individual man is an identityarian and communitarian terms and in historical terms and thus political terms. This is the means by which he takes his place in the world. Whereby he comes to identify what is reasonable within his moral and political and thus historical consciousness from what is pre-rational and merely derive from the passions. Now the mere appearance again in realization of the divine of a providential phenomenon of the mind of God that does not say that God's will was not ultimately constituted or exhausted or fulfilled by the state or the existence of the state. This is a misunderstanding and that that be a form of high idolatry and it's also a basic misunderstanding of the haggles' political ontology. The state is not ending itself. God's will in the affairs of a man and the realization of the inner psychological life in terms of praxis and tangible and concrete and corporeal things. That's why it's essential to understand that haggle was not some romantic nationalist or any kind of nationalist because the state is essentially an estate craft. It's essentially rational and to turn away from practical reason and favor some romantic ambition or to pursue some utopian social engineering project in contrast. As a lot of reformers and capital-eleverals are prone to, or to turn away from the state and political order as it actually is, ungranted somehow immoral or incorrect. This is to deny reality. It's to tell to saying that you don't believe in gravity, like Wiley Coyote does. Wiley Coyote claims he's ignorant of gravity. He walks off a cliff and he's walking on nothing. He doesn't roll out our hands and a book on gravity and then he learns of it and he falls. That's kind of a good metaphor for the way utopian's tend to view political matters. Philosophy can't go beyond the reality of human affairs or beyond what is potential and potentially realizable within the domain of the political. This is actually a significant, beyond this narrow domain. The function of philosophy itself is not to criticize the supposed moral shortcoming of sociological or political paradigms or to invent perfect societies and conceptual terms. This function is to identify and draw out the truth that informs reality as it is. This is what Hagel viewed as a mandate. He was quite a manly concerned with demonstrating, systemically, exploiting and proving that there is an underlying and essential rationality to the state and statecraft and praxis, in spite of apparent and characteristic irrationality, born of passion and will of a reason as is commonly alleged about the political. The entirety of the process of statecraft or presents a total logical whole which is greater than the sum of its constituent elements. Again, this whole tennis towards the realization and fulfillment, Hagel used the term triumph of reason. This is a metaphor of applied to the Hagelian paradigm of a Gothic cathedral where there is this enormous complexity within its architecture that nevertheless is incredibly harmonious. Hagel viewed from a distance. I think I've been at something more like, imagine an obelisk in 2001, you know what the model with? If you're pressed up against an obelisk in the desert, you can't really make out its configuration. But at distance, it becomes clear that there's a perfect symmetry there and that it's a deliberately configured object. That's really the way to understand this historical process and Demaif drew echo this in moral and aesthetic terms. This is really interesting. But this historical process, the political theorist needs to, and the inform layman alike, these approach that says, as a systemic whole, you can't take discrete instances of what appears to be a mass flight from reason in the historical records. And out of context, hold this out as a proverbial case in chief that see there's not any rational practice underway here. It's all this scatter shot and an impassioned activity that isn't informed by precedent nor historical memory. This is the wrong way to look at it. And the Higgy Elimir Abuttle II would be, well, obviously it's not true because here we are. You know, I mean that that. that that speaks for itself. You know, you don't. And that that's why a lot of people too, misconstrued or misunderstand, Hagle is a progressive. Like that's not what he's saying. He's not saying that, you know, the historical process is just like developmental cycle to a higher morality. What he's saying is that, you know, there's underlying structural features that, you know, can only be interpreted as derivative of reason, you know, and I think that's an arguable. If for another reason, then that we would exist in a state of complete stasis. Or, I'm asking, we would have gone extinct, you know, because people would have starved death and we were being able to, you know, develop remedies based upon, you know, the knowledge arrived from precedent and things. But, um, the, this does create something of a paradox because it does suggest that history is the result of unconscious forces. You know, at the same time, positing that conscious processes of the rational mind created the model of God, you know, is, what corresponds to the historical process. You know, so the orient against this perspective is that, the state is both a final result allegedly and a precondition. But again, that's, that's, that's true. That's the way to understand it. You know, it is the result of individual action and thought and inter-psychological experiences. The interplay of the passions does play a huge role in these outcomes. But, the empirical fact of statecraft, as, you know, understood from, on the conventional timeline, I guess, you know, 5,000 BC, like a Tirecy Freighties civilization, until the present, you know, um, the origin of political order and the cutting of reason, or a basic rational core, even if you reject the providential move on as the key variable, you know, I think those objections tend to evaporate. It's, uh, what kind of time we go, okay. And this too, this is one reason it's so misguided, when people interpret, uh, when people interpret or assign, is some, this is some kind of moral weight to history or speak of war and peace as a process that needs to be remedied, or arbitrarily declare that slave-holing societies were just evil. You know, the states, like any dialectical, like the product of any dialectical process is born of conflict, obviously. And the state itself, again, the state meaning the configuration of political order, is literally the setting for the theater, if you will, a myriad potential conflicts. You know, and this is, um, this is where Carl Schmidt parts up of Hegel in very explicit terms. You know, when Schmidt talks about the doctrine of exceptionalism, like the state of exception, which is essential to understanding the Schmittian concept of sovereign authority. You know, he emphasizes above all else that the invocation of the state of exception cannot be legitimately involved to preserve an obsolescent constitutional regime. You know, um, categorically and axiomatically, you know, state craft and the praxis of political order is a process of creative destruction. You know, um, and this is, the state reflects the mind and soul and man himself. Man doesn't do what he does to exist in isolation and and remove himself from history. Man's existence as a historical actor is basically like a fight to the death for recognition for some kind of posterity. You know, because his immortal life is short and man essentially is a creator. You know, that's again, what distinguishes man from peace of the field. Um, no man other than an absolute credent or a a mental dwarf views his life as existing only for himself in splendid isolation. You know, the only, really the only in historical terms again, the only reason to create or act at all is a for recognition and to guarantee the enduring historical memory and posterity of his deeds and and actions. Um, and extrapolated to a nakedly political context between friends and enemies. The degree, the, the wish for recognition in the form of cultural posterity and triumph within this historical process while repudiating a competing actor, you know, similarly situated within an opposing paradigm. I mean, that's the, that's the essence of or in peace. Like that's the essence of conflict for which, you know, the state is the stage. You know, the enemy is he who wishes for his own way of life to flourish and endure perennially while repudiating the similar wish will and impulse within his enemy within the heart and mind of his enemy. You know, and, um, this, this is neither good nor bad. This is simply what is. You know, and I mean, such that there is a moral aspect to it. Okay, to remove, to remove that catalyst. I mean, what, what, what would there be like a, a, a culturalist society of sleeping people, like figuratively and literally like, like, how would that be desirable? You know, like I say it again and again, one of the reasons why contemporary liberals are not, they do not have a legitimate perspective. You know, they're, they're basically saying that like the perfect society is like a nursing home or or a hospital or something or maybe like a prison where there's, you know, comparatively when there's serious accommodations or good food or something. You know, I mean that, like like robbing the human life of all meaning, eradicating history, eradicating old value, because that's what makes things physically secure. I mean, that's, that's literally senile, you know, and, um, I realize a lot of these people are probably aren't capable of in every hending political life in any thing approaching a complete capacity but even even limited capacity is that that's a strike any man or woman is totally absurd you know and i think that i think some of that is beginning to accrue i think that's one of the reasons why this uh it kind of it can sense it's on values or lack thereof that was so characteristic of you know the the brief kind of triumphalist era of the clinton nineties until you know 2001 you know i think that that's why the the vestigial aspects up at or something nobody takes seriously and you know i mean because like how could you take that seriously um but uh yes sorry i mean see where i'm at as you can tell i'm still not at 100 percent so if you're giving me a vaccine kind of uh i i i swear i'm not going to see you know i'll i'm just um still feeling a bit uh out of it yeah let's uh yeah let's uh or not well and it's also too here the this and this is important and this is uh Hobbes um this is this is this is this is a parallel and how busy you thought it too the the the original conflict kind of the the original you know um the original um conflict paradigm that is prior to the state is the conflict between master and slave okay and in hegel's formulation this this kind of setting of the stage of the uh of the uh the primordial stage with you know the master slave dichotomy and in the hegelian formulation that that's that's the parallel of uh of Hobbes you know state of nature if you follow me um and in both cases there's a tremendous mark who are like imprint rather on on historical reality subsequent the historical and political reality subsequent you know and axiomatically you know that suggests not only at the state emergence from violence because the first relationship among a man is you know want to conflict um and it uh it establishes the motivating factors in pre-rational terms for political action which are derivative of the passions you know the first being the first being vanity or the desire for recognition and posterity and and power what we think of as clout and secondly the fear of violent death you know um but there's a unique characteristic in the master slave paradigm because the it doesn't end with the victory of the master and his ability to corral his slave into um this paradigm of uh servitude you know this is a dynamic process in hegelian terms you know and the master is far from idle in fact he's the opposite the master is able to devote a hundred percent of his energies and thought in his quest for recognition and posterity you know for prestige and glory generally through war you know slave-alens aside the first societies were were were were based on war and slavery does a slavery is complex and the reason why it's truly the universal sociological institution there's anthropological reasons for this there's psychological ones i mean we could we could we could devote uh an endless series on discussing the various aspects of slavery okay and what its origins are and anthropological terms historical ones biological ones psychological ones but in purely political terms you know uh warrior societies take slaves essentially so that you know the master cast can be free to pursue glory through warfare okay um but at the same time that that doesn't mean the slave is it's something like worthless life or that he should be disdain or that people should have to intem for him like not at all because he works you know albeit that satisfy the demands of the master and the produce or and/or harvest things according to the master's needs it's the slave who transforms nature and himself you know he becomes physically strong he develops skills he removes objects from nature and reconfigures them or processes them to make them utile you know um and his daily life you know he's working uh in the service i'm an abstract idea you know devised by the master but also you know an immediate project to be realized so this i so i mean he the external world is basically only exists and like the praxis of the master only comes to fruition through literally the physical labor of the slave you know and that's um that that this is also like resonant in Christianity too and like a lot of people don't understand they had aider you know and the the ammunition and in the pulling letters especially to like not this i mean he shouldn't disdain slaves anyway because you like a man's moral character is not to turn by a station but this is a core component of that and people don't understand it it's not it's not some primordial or or um great integrity version of like a noble savage myth or something and it's not it's not some moral claim about you know how uh the durechid classes or somehow you know superior to their haughty masters it's exactly what i just relayed you know and what hegel explicated um you know and the um but in turn you know the masters uh when we talk about leisure in and within this classical paradigm of of of master and slavery like we're not talking about a guy sitting around and sipping bulk drinks and and wearing like white shirts or or having you know like pretty like sexy ladies like feeding grapes i mean yeah there's like some of that but um generally uh we're talking about um you know uh the cultivation of the heroic and aristocratic attitude which is brought to full fruition through creative destruction and warfare and high politics and statecraft you know so there's this there's an essential um there's there's an essential um function that both the master and the slave perform you know without either one um the cutting of reason would not have been possible you know and um higher life you know of which uh the political is It's kind of both more sanguineery and immediately significant. I mean, all over the fact that its subject matter is literally life and death. Like, none of this would be possible. So you can't sit around and say, like, "Well, slavery is evil." That's exactly like plate tectonics is evil. Okay, I mean, so, okay, fine, history is evil. Because, I mean, you can't, you know, it's not something that serious people entertain. You know, I mean, it's something too, like, one of the reasons, you know, and this is one of the things that is actually pure, it's one of the few things that Marxists are pure hagelians in terms of. You know, like, you're one of the reasons I object to it. So, stranniously, like, you know, I was talking about this in a pod the other day with my dear friend Anthony. You know, like, like, limousine liberals who love to sit around and morally pontificate about the supposed evils of class dynamics. Like, Marxists don't think that way. Like, Marxists are true hagelians in this sense, you know, and, you know, plus two, like, it's arbitrary. Like, people like up to this and clear, you know, like, in the jungle. I mean, that's like the sub-tack. I see no, like, it's a novel. Like, oh, a great slavery is the most evil thing ever. But, you know, working in some filthy, dangerous factory, restoration wages were like 20% of men die on the job. That's okay. You know, it's, there's an arbitraryness to this kind of feign moral outrage that additionally, like, impugns any legitimacy. But, um, yeah, I'm going to, we should stop here because I'm going to take us in a bit of a different direction and the hagel discussion. But, I hope this is a huge topic. And frankly, it's hard to distill down to intelligible terms. I hope I'm doing an okay job of it. I'm not fishing for praise. But if I'm not, I want the subs to tell me that I'm not, you know, I, the feedback is essential. But, yeah, I really appreciate, um, you hosting me for this man. Of course, of course, anytime. Um, tell everybody where they can find your stuff and what you got going on. Yeah, there's a lot going on actually. And again, forgive me this past week. Nothing really got done on to me being ill. But, um, that's what is the fine. You right now is sub-stack. You know, that's one of the few platforms that doesn't censor me and other people. That you can find my podcast. You know, I want to form stuff. You know that we got an active chat there. It's a real Thomas 777 that's sub-stack.com. I've still listening help in building a new website, man. And I'll shout that out again on my platforms. But I need help with that as I kind of reconfigure my content. I'm doing a stream here and about an hour on rumble. And at one last, I'm going to start doing regular streams there. You can link to the rumble through the sub-stack. I'm on telegram. I'm on Instagram. I'm seeking you shall find. But yeah, for right now is I reconfigure my kind of the way I do things. You know, find me at sub-stack. I am making progress on my manuscript. I'm writing a book on modern political theory and particularly the regime that was imposed after the Second World War. That should be wrapped by the end of summer. Yeah, that's where I'm at. All right. Until part two on Hagel. Thank you very much, Thomas. I want to welcome everyone back to the Picanana show. Thomas is here. And we're doing part two, Hagel, continental philosophy series. Yeah. Yeah, indeed. You know, something that's important to register in a discussion of Hagel. You know, I always come back to the point again and again that Hagel's not just an intrinsically right wing theorist. He's the protender of his storicism. You know, in Owing to the epistemic assumptions of his storicism. And Hagel's political ontology. Like what he insists is the purpose of the state, as well as his psychological. You know, constitution. That can't be extricated from. You know, things that are. Discreetly. You know, related to. The significance of of organic cultural phenomenon and things like that. It's really anti liberal. Okay. Just ecstatically. So that's the reason why I've always maintained this inappropriate. In conceptual terms. To talk about right and left Hageelians. I mean, it's kind of shorthand for real phenomena. Yeah, but like left Hageelians aren't Hageelians. You know, they're people who believe in. A dialectical process. In history. But it really has nothing to do with the Hageelian paradigm other than. Other than in the most kind of. Lusely structured capacities. You know, so it's what you're talking about Hageelianism. You're talking about it kind of. I'd argue right wing and at the very least kind of conservative. Historicism. That views human populations. As a product of a discrete psychology that. You know, the nuances of which can't be interpreted. A primary or by appeal to. You know, abstract universalisms and things. You know, and that's. Kind of what I wanted to get into today to today. Like I said, for my life. I saw social. I can also fatigue and some symptoms. Of this virus I can't seem to shake. So. This sub's pleased for giving me if I repeat myself or if. I seem a little bit out of it. You know, I. I. I try to make sure that I. I always deliver properly. I believe where we left off last time. Was. I believe I. Raise the matter of Carl Schmidt. Very much wanted that to Hageel. And describing the state. As being fundamentally born of conflict. You know, not just conflict external to. The. You know, insular population that. Devices the state for defensive. Purpose is, you know, contra the external. Fo. But within the state itself, it's a venue for. Miriam conflicts, excellent potential. You know, within the cultural form that consensus. Is emergence. And this always do. Hageel identifies the. The origin of this phenomenon. As anthropological in nature. It's a right. It's on the nature of man himself. Okay. Man rises above the level of an animal. The. And the low. And. You know, of his capability. For higher reason. But you know, there's also. A process of engagement. Psychologically. By which man like raises himself to that. Status of elevation. And so an isolation. Through, you know, merely contemplative processes or something. But really in a mortal struggle for recognition. You know, every man is conscious. Every man who's, you know, is. Is saying. And reasoned. You know, and not, and not somehow mentally compromised. You know, he largely exists. For himself and for his own purposes. You know, in these purposes derived from a consciousness. Of his. Freedom to act in ways. that gained him recognition. Now we're not just talking about, you know, cloud or fame or prestige. I mean, obviously people covet those kinds of things too. And it's part and parcel what we're talking about. But we're discussing it phenomenon that's rather deeper. You know, we see, we're going to hate all those about recognition. He's really talking about participation and things that are, you know, transcendent in historical terms. You know, what Aristotle talked about is, you know, the magnanimous man, he has a basically a aristocratic perspective. You know, well, even men who aren't aristocratic by nature or magnanimous, you know, they do have this desire to kind of overcome death through historical living. You know, whether it's that the fame of a dead man's deeds bring out or, you know, siring strong children, you know, who'll go on to, you know, participate in the life of the nation or, you know, excelling at a learned profession or at a trade that requires, you know, learned craftsmanship, you know, and the only way for this kind of recognition of any significance or for it to really be emerging within that paradigm is if others recognize the significance of these things. Okay, so this process can't occur in isolation. It requires a historical and thus a cultural situatedness, you know. It's also a process that's inherently competitive, you know, each, every man, even if he's, even if he's basically moral and basically fair-minded and has a developed sense of equity and things of this nature, he's still going to want his own acts and deeds and character to accomplish recognition without being forced and turned, you know, to recognize equivalent merit and others, you know. And this in very basic terms, you know, is the kind of conflict intrinsic to the human condition. So such that man is a social animal and human sociality again is what makes this process possible and thus it's what it is to be a human being in an axiomatic terms, you know. Yeah, there's really just locations and things where people deliberately remove themselves from this paradigm, but that itself is kind of overcoming, you know, and transcendent activity, precisely because they're taking themselves out of a psychological state and a kind of social situatedness that is at base intrinsically human and normative. You know, and to accomplish this process of recognition, you know, men will risk their, their life, their wealth, their reputation, and even their life, since it becomes a mortal struggle and it can only end in inequality. Because at some point, the dominant cast, and this can take various forms, you know, in terms of the peculiar characteristics that define it, you know, we'll submit to the superior prestige, or a de-dewarantine recognition, or mode of life that defines the cultural environment. You know, there will always be a ruling class and that ruling class only is extant because the competitors to it have submitted to it, you know, and have seized waging this struggle whereby, you know, they demand any quality of recognition or properly perhaps they see trying to overcome their masters, you know, there's always a willful aspect of submission in the paradigm between masters and slaves. Even if you accept the posh of it, you're just a trillion posh of it, that there is such a thing as, you know, natural slavery. You know, so in other words, every man emerges from this struggle by necessity, every man emerges from this fight for recognition as either a master or a slave. So human reality is essentially social, you know, and human sociology, owned alogas is intrinsically political. So this submission to the mastery of another and the accomplishing, the realization of peace within the parameters of this sort of ethical and aesthetical and cultural consensus, you know, based on a shared historical experience and ancestral memory. This is the beginning of states, okay. The state, the primordial state is the boundaries within this process has been accomplished. However, both the, the master requires more than just mere acknowledgement from his social inferiority and similarly, you know, the slave requires for his life to hold meaning, you know, more than just an acknowledgement of the supremacy of the master cast and, you know, thus an entitlement of his cast, nobleness of life. In general terms, you know, even if there's, even if the moral and ethical value of the lever of the slave is acknowledged, and even if it's still a submission to the authority of the master, while still retaining his own dignity as a man is acknowledged, you know, he's still as a man and as a human being, similarly, longs for recognition in his own right, had to be situated within a higher, or at least a perennial conceptual reality or form of life, like material compensation cannot say this desire, nor facilitated. But even if the slave is manumited and later becomes rich, you know, that that doesn't say, first of all, it's an exception anyway, but regardless, it doesn't say this desire. It's the only thing that can facilitate that is a recognition by another free consciousness. The paradigm then within the state, between the classes, is it based psychological? You know, again, I know I said it before, but this is fundamentally important, I understand. The haggie-wing ontology, and it is the state which facilitates the recognition and it's the setting of it, and this desire is stated collectively and individually by living historically, okay, and taking part in the communitarian and historic life of the nation and living chronially within the historical consciousness that is timeless and linear. Okay. And transcends death and generational and temporal boundaries. Now, what's essential to heal is at the state. Basically, yes, the, it's got to act as we reconcile these things. It's not enough to just, you know, create a system whereby tensions between cats are just mitigated, such that, you know, there's not sanguine or he has still what he's emergent. And that it's not enough that the state simply you don't protect property, rights, and things. You know, by enforcing, you know, the positive law, or what have you. The, it's, it's, it's got a selective, it's kind of reciprocity of recognition that was the master and slave, both aim in vain without the state. On the other hand, to or in addition to the state needs to be a teacher and inculcate what the master and slave with a belief in their own historical situatedness and their own belonging, you know, to the Paulus or the racial community, the Vogue or the, or the nation, you know, and it's got to inculcate people with these values, such a degree, that they'll put aside not just the discrete private ego and the desires therein, as well as, um, you know, the kind of wider caste-based identity, contra the other within the social organism. But it's got to, it's, it's, it's got to make people truly believe, you know, in the efficacy and value of the labor of the other, as well as, uh, an understanding that it wore, you know, each man is, uh, who can take up arms, there's a, an ethical equality there, among all who are willing to lay down their lives, you know, to preserve the historical life of the nation, you know, and, uh, this is why the subject matter of the state is worn piece, not just because in existential terms, in practically speaking, it's a defensive structure, you know, um, whereby, the historical community can only exist, within its parameters, without being subsumed or destroyed, you know, by those outside of it, who, by asserting their own, is our for recognition, and historical imperative, would repudiate, you know, their, their way of life violently. But there's also, um, you know, a profoundly psychological mechanism that worked here, you know, what, what reconciles, what the glue of civil society, again, is, um, the common enterprise of warfare, actual and potential, and the obligation of citizenship, um, you know, upon, incumbent upon every, every class, you know, in common, which, uh, I mean, yes, there's command and obedience, is nowhere more sharply expressed than, you know, in, in, uh, animations, military forces, but, you know, all men die the same in battle, you know, and, um, the, uh, command element, and, um, the conspirector and listed element, you know, they rely on each other, um, in the most critical ways, you know, and that breaks down, um, what would otherwise be an intractable hostility, um, and this is why the state can only derive from a common psychological experience of ancestral memory, okay, and this is why it's key, you know, as I said, I think, for one, live, Hagel's axiomatically anti-liberal. You can't talk about a liberal hake alienism, and you can't talk about Hagel's account of, uh, what proceeds, you know, the form of political organization, and anthropological terms, in, in terms of abstract postulates, you know, because the only tie that binds, the only thing that facilitates peace within the parameters of the state, I mean, the only thing that rationalizes the state in and of itself is this kind of shared ancestral memory, and this experience of a common history, you know, and, um, this is key, and again, I think also before I went live, you know, for the guys who reach Spangled Banner, I know, I know a lot of the, the young guys do, and that's great. The death that Hagel cannot be overstated, Hagel's a progenitor of historicism, you know, um, in a way that's even more pronounced than other, um, you know, modern, uh, disciplines of political theory and, you know, historical graphical, um, analysis and things. Um, so if people need, uh, an answer to why is Hagel important, from like a partisan perspective, well, that's why, um, the, uh, and there's two, the two aspects of the human being, as a political agent, um, that the state must account for and reconcile and permit the flourish within constructive parameters. Hagel identified these two tendencies, a subjective liberty, an object of liberty, subjective liberty is the natural state of a man, and it's most product we express capacity, that is, subjective liberty is an individual will and consciousness pursuing its particular goals, its creative impulses, you know, its desires for recognition and transcendent, um, you know, uh, life of a sort beyond this mortal coil, um, objective liberty is the substantial general will, you know, essentially the demands of citizenship and the things that facilitate the realization of those demands, for example, at war, you know, the general will, deriving from aspects of shared psychology, born of historical memory, the reconciliation of these things is what Hagel called the serene totality, which is the union of the particular universal within the unity of the state, you know, ideally if the state is performing its function. It guarantees not just the posterity of the people, you know, of the demos of the Volk. What have you? But it facilitates the unity and the flourishing of the discrete individual will and the particular interest therein. And allows us to say that they find a full expression in the fact of the citizens duties to the state. In direct proportion, you know, to the individual rights he is allowed. I mean, unpack that a little bit. You know, basically, what he goes getting at is that these sagrifieds is incumbent upon the discrete subjective ego, you know, born of will and passion. The state as the instantiation of a reason, you know, the aspects of those things that demands the sacrifice are perfected by way of objective liberty and the channeling of these energies into enter prizes that can only be fulfilled by the general will. Okay. So you're not really talking about deprivations of, you know, discrete liberty and action, or you're not really asking the individual man to forfeit some sort of potentiality within himself, because it's only within the state that these things can be, it can find full, can come to full forage. And again, as we talked about last time, hegel's not talking about the state, that's something like bureaucratic, like secular apparatus, nor is it some kind of ending itself. You know, this is critical. Hegel would have viewed a state like a managerial state like we have today as totally illegitimate and pointless. You know, the state is only legitimate again so far as it is allowing the realization of these things, you know, and that is tailored to facilitate these things and that it's premised on, you know, the posterity of the historical community that it encompasses, you know, in other words, it's a true, you know, like folk community if you want to think about it in those terms, you know, because that comes up again and again, especially from, you know, people who are culturally anglophone, who have this kind of natural enmity towards political authority, which is well situated considering the state of things since 1933 and arguably since, you know, the 1840s or so. But that's not what Hegel's talking about. And it's interesting here because Hegel compares and contrasts Athens and Rome in ways that are critical, in my opinion, you know, Hegel's view of the Greeks much as, you know, they deserve to be praised in much as high culture was perfected in the object capacities, you know, in paraclyze Athens. The Greeks failed on grounds that their cultural form, their psychological and moral orientation, their political ontology. It didn't permit or acknowledge subjective liberty in the freedom that attends it in any meaningful way. The Greeks lived very organically, spontaneously and immediately, you know, spangler made the point that in these Athenian freezes, you know, it's always, it's always a sensuously present body, you know, I've like a warrior, like a farmer or of like, you know, a beautiful woman, but they're always standing in front of nothing, you know, it's like there's, there's not, there's not like a historical past and future in the way we think about it. And this is key because again, you know, and to understand Hegel's criticism, you know, read through cities and read about the trial of Socrates, like the Athenian ideal was basically living up to what your function is, you know, as a Yale man, you know, as a slave, you know, like as a, as a craftsman, you know, education should be for military service and the demands of citizenship, you know, and the households should be, you know, essentially a school of command and obedience. You know, there's no thought given to the, the subjective, what gives rise is the subjective liberty, you know, and the desire for recognition and the flourishing of these impulses and imperatives, you know, to be a good Athenian is to be in the habit, literally, be habituated, of a living and dying for the fatherland, with, like without reflection. You know, so there's no place for subjectivity and any capacity, you know, and anybody who claimed otherwise, you know, well, that's, that that be viewed as a lowly, you know, it be viewed as related to personal well-being and, you know, that kind of thought is only worthy of a slave or alternatively it be viewed as subversive, you know, and as a subtle way of attacking public morals, you know, which is exactly why Socrates found himself, I mean, I think, I can't really hear what Cyril and I think Socrates was not a good guy, but the reasons why he ended up going to the gallows were fairly dubious, you know, and even his critics acknowledged that. You know, the, you know, but at the same time, you know, Hagel acknowledged that there was a lot to be said for the Athenian civic culture and that it did, you know, inculcate men with, uh, what was inarguably, you know, like heroic and noble ambition, you know, so he goes into the baby out of the bathwater, but, um, you know, the, uh, and this is significant, I'm assuming around a bit, but this is significant to Heiger's critique too, because Heiger mirrored a lot of that critique, um, Heiger made the point that the Greeks believed in natural world, um, you know, revealed itself to man, ungrowns that, you know, being, and the way it was interpreted, uh, from the presacratics through, um, Plato was basically that like a man is like part of the natural world, you know, is intrinsically capable of accepting these revelations, but through Logos, you know, the world opens up to him to exhibit a deeper reality than beasts could perceive, you know, but Dyson is, is Heiger referred to it, it's, it's still fundamentally passive, you know, in this capacity, um, what's critical to Hegel and and heiger in contrast is that they reject that entirely. Man, on grounds of logos, he finds it all situated within a discreet political ontology. And, only to that fact, he experiences being as a rational and deliberate agent. He's not just situated within nature and owing to his elevated capacity or reason. He's noticing a revelation that a woofer, a dog, or a bear can't. This is not a middling distinction. It's key to understanding the difference between classical philosophy and what became the continental tradition. Noose, noose, a rational soul. This axiomatically finds expression through fellow fueling within the Paulus and between people's constituting the demos to the body politic and the Heideggerian view. That's a Higaly in point two. There is no. The Paulus doesn't emerge because of this kind of accidental revealing within the conceptual horizon of man's being, owing to logos whereby then the better man realises we've got to educate men to be heroic and abide with the fatherland requires them. No, there's a very man as an active agent. To hire reason, he literally creates this paradigm so that all higher values and recognition can become the fruition. That is the process of statecraft, literally. Where is the origin of the state? That was a bit tangential but I think it's important. Hegel bring it back. Hegel contrasted it into the Rome. He cited Rome's frailty of essentially a constellation of mirror causes within the body politic, contra the Athenian situation. In Rome individuality, the subjective individual will. It was absolutely recognized both abstractly and externally but in so doing the state there's an organic hole was dissolved. Rome, like late America, has more in common with Rome than people think. I know that that's like a cliche comparison but people think about it in terms of things like access or its specuous consumption or neo-imperialism. They're approaching it the wrong way. A lot of laws cause this story interwised to this incidentally. Even if you don't accept that perspective. The Roman political ethos, it basically degraded all individuals to the level of private persons, like formally equal with one another. Within the class they found themselves possessed a formal rights in common. But the only thing that held them together was this abstract commitment to your rights as our Roman. There was nothing at all organic about the Constitution. There was no concept of an ethical consensus born of an organic historical experience. There was nothing concrete in the moral life of the Roman nation, later the Roman Empire. Other than these kinds of abstract postulates relating to at least nominally individual rights and concerns. So consequently, in taking to logical extremes the abstractness of equality and the purported absolute moral imperative of facilitating the free expression of individual wants and desires that demand for recognition but again an historical way related to wish fulfillment more than anything and actively opposed to any communitarian imperative. This is the Roman state and states like it, like in my opinion the American regime. This creates a repository of active nihilism. And there's a very real danger of all such states deteriorating into terror. Like the state itself is going to be an instrumentality of terror. According to the fact that the very aforementioned abstractness and inability to define equality what the same time suggesting that formal equality are these kinds of formal rights, individual rights, attending citizenship. You know, it is not just the highest imperative of the state but also the only tie that binds between these distributed individuals. The basic renders all public perspectives outside of those promulgated by the minority cadres who cause the state itself. The basic renders everything else oppositional to the state. Like every other modality of thought. I mean that's what we're at now, you know obviously. I mean people aren't being slaughtered and mass like in Jacob and France or the Soviet Union but that doesn't mean that couldn't happen. You know, history doesn't repeat itself. I know the idiots say that it does but there are predictable outcomes within common paradigms or the limited number of variables that can possibly constitute political life at scale. You know, this is a real thing and it's not just simply a shame of like all the right types or of you know midwid libertarian guys. Like they're actually right about that when they point out that this like the cult of equality is more susceptible to becoming a terrorist mentality than you know a more conventional mode of government. That's very true. You run into people and it's not just post-war liberals who abide this kind of Alan Bloom Carl Popper stupid on purpose sort of you know superficially persuasive but you know kind of intellectually impoverished viewpoint held out as pragmatic. It's not just guys like that. You know, there's people who are more reasonable and learned. You know, in a common, we're presented a critique of Hagle as well as it's being this kind of authoritarian brute. That's the wrong way to, that's the wrong way to securitize Hagle. Hagle is adamant that it's an absolute moral imperative that the state recognize the liberty inherent to mind is capable of higher reason. You know, derivative of Logos and you know, you consider it an absolute imperative that the state recognizes that Logos is the source of discrete, he's discrete and individual ambitions you know within human minds. But by no means does this suggest that this must or should you know lead the procedural democracy? You know, and those things aren't mutually exclusive or somehow inconsistent. You know, hey, let me the point, like, look, like this idea that every single person has some share stake in deliberating or deciding on political matters, you know, and grounds that all individuals are members of the state. So it's concerns, are there are concerns. You know, he said that he said that's the abject nonsense. You know, like again, like really all the state owes the people in this regard is an acknowledgement, you know, of the liberty inherent to logos and the minds of people still capable. You know, that doesn't confer upon any given man like a right to have a say in affairs of state craft. The individual person, he should only be taken into account politically. So far as he occupies a definite place within the political organism, say for example, he's a general or, you know, he's got an obvious aptitude for state craft, you know, or he's got a unique skill set that confers upon him a kind of augury about power political affairs. You know, or he's a brilliant analyst, you know, a haggly one even further he said, the possibility, you know, the potentiality at least in abstract terms for each man to potentially become member of the governing class or, you know, or like a higher judiciary or anything like that, you know, that that still doesn't confer upon him a right to be heard or for authority to somehow defer to his opinion as if it had some sort of merit. You know, if in fact he has aptitude for such things, you know, he will rise to that office and, you know, a natural authority will accrue based on his service as a competent representative, but it does violence to reason and good government is derivative of a reason to entertain this delusion that there's some sort of general right to be heard on political affairs, you know, and again, like that, the, this balancing between the general will and the subjective mind, you know, the grave, grave violence is done to this, you know, kind of necessary unity and balancing of these essential aspects that suggest any sort of any sort of egalitarian ethic needs to reign in terms of procedural democracy, you know, so that's kind of that should put to bed any notion that you can reconcile the Galean theory with any kind of like liberal theory of government, you know, and this is why Hagel's got the consummately European philosophy, you know, before every European theory is, modesty European theory of statecraft, prior to the day of defeat, because there are no more like European theories of statecraft that been 1945, I mean, that's not a part of the take, like it does not, they don't exist, you know, you've got, you've got these carpool call iterations of them, of the American regime, you know, in occupied countries, and then you have this kind of bizarre minigurialism in the UK that isn't really promised on anything, you know, other than a loose, and deluded mythology that, you know, they, they have some legacy moral authority on grounds that, you know, they, they were an American lackey during the, during the Zionist and Communist war in Europe, but yeah, that's what I got, for Hagel, I'm going to speak more on this, but then we'd be here all night. I'm probably going to have some concluding thoughts on the next episode on Hagel, and then we'll, like I said, I want to do a theology episode because it's essential, I mean, that's important stuff anyway, but I think it's critical to include that, then any discussion account, and I'll put it on the next episode of the theory, you know, we'll talk about it, quietness, and then we'll cover Martin Luther and Calvin, and yeah, that's what I think of the next episode, if that's real. Sounds good. All right, let everyone know where they can find you. Yeah, I'm retooling my website with, with the help of a dear friend of mine who assist me with things relating to IT. You can access it now, although Baron Miner's a work in progress, it's Thomas777.com is number 7HOMAS777.com, otherwise right now you should visit my subset. That's where most of my content is, you know, especially hot content and longer form stuff. It's realthomas777.substac.com, and from there there's links to my Instagram, my 12gram, and things of that nature. All right, until the next episode. Yeah, thank you, man.